THE AMAZING GRACE OF THE BROWN PELICAN

It seems to me that pelicans, like Rodney Dangerfield, get no respect. Or at least not as much respect as they deserve.

When you think of graceful oceanic birds you think of, say, northern Gannets, which dive and hit the water like sleek little missiles, diving as deep as 40 feet to catch their prey. Or, perhaps, of osprey, which hover, then make powered dives to catch and muscle fish into the air in their razorsharp talons. Or great blue herons, which stand statue-like in the shallows on their long legs, lacy nuptial feathers blowing in the breeze, waiting to stab down quickly at the first oblivious fish, frog or crab to stray beneath them.

You generally don’t think of pelicans, which, if you are not paying attention, seem to hit the water like a turkey dropped from a helicopter, and then just sit there floating for a while.

I think part of it is their shape. They are big, rotund, goofy-looking birds that weigh up to 10 pounds and don’t correspond with many people’s notions of physical grace, not unlike Rodney Dangerfield. When they walk, they do so with kind of a shuffling waddle – also not unlike Rodney Dangerfield – which several serious scientific texts I have read describe as “clumsy.” And they’ve got that long, unwieldy bill that runs almost half the length of their body.

They look a little bit like dinosaurs, which makes sense, as they haven’t changed their shape much in about 30 million years.

When I say pelicans in this instance, I mean brown pelicans, a species that is hard to avoid in the Florida Keys year-round. (We also get the larger, less common, more swan-like white pelicans here in the winter, but anyone who is not wowed by the sight of a white pelican is just living their life wrong.)

The notion that brown pelicans are ungainly creatures is belied, though, by their actual physical capabilities. They are some of the most agile, dexterous and naturally nimble creatures out there. They just hide it well.

One of the easiest ways to get clued into their physical fluidity is to find yourself at the beach, or out on the water, on one of those windless summer mornings, when the water is as smooth and gleaming as a mirror. Odds are a pelican will come along soon, and just inches above the water, flying so slowly that it seems impossible for the bird to stay aloft. The bird will look like it is hardly moving a muscle. Occasionally a wingtip will brush the water’s surface. (If you’re in a boat, they may rise up to clear your wake, then drop down again.)

What’s happening is the pelican is taking advantage of ground effect, a phenomenon where the air pushed down by the wings hits the water and pushes back up, creating a cushion of air that keeps the bird aloft with a seemingly impossible lack of speed. (It’s the same phenomenon that allowed Howard Hughes in the 1950s to fly his borderline non-functional seaplane the Spruce Goose for 26 seconds and thus fulfill a government contract.)

The place where the brown pelican’s aerial adroitness really becomes apparent, though, is when they feed, which can be seen in the nearshore waters off the Keys almost any time of day, but especially in the early morning and early evening.

The brown pelican is unusual among the eight pelican species in the world in that they feed by plunge diving. (The closely related Peruvian pelican is the only other pelican species that does that.)

They will dive from up to 60 feet above the water, and they will dive into water as little as two feet deep. At first it looks a little ungainly, a little unprofessional. But watch them long enough and it becomes clear what precision is involved.

They don’t just fall into the water. They dive in a ritualistic manner, at first rising up a little, then tucking in their neck and angling to the right, then folding their wings, sticking their neck out, and corkscrewing to a point where they nearly invert themselves, hitting the water at angle of somewhere between 60 and 90 degrees, depending on the light and clarity of the water. The left side of their neck takes the brunt of the impact, which works, because their esophagus and trachea are located on the right side.

Their body only partially sinks, kept afloat by sacs beneath the skin, which also help absorb the crash. But their head goes under, with their bill open, the impact causing their lower mandible to bow on both sides, like the bird suddenly has a cartoonishly wide underbite. It allows the pouch below, known as the gular sac, to stretch and fill with up to 21 pints of water, which is three times what their stomach can hold. And in all that water is what they want – a number of small fish.

Draining the water out can take up to a minute, and oftentimes a Laughing Gull will come in and land on a pelican’s head, prying their small chisel of a bill into the pelican’s much larger bill, to steal fish. You’d think it would irk the pelicans, but they seem pretty placid about it, like losing a percentage of their catch is just the cost of doing business.

Adult pelicans are thought to be successful in close to 85% of their dives; juveniles, less so.

It’s hard to find any data about how many dives the average pelican makes a day, but I’ve sat there and watched them dive repeatedly for hours on end, with no sign of their energy flagging or their form degrading. After a while it gets hard to see a brown pelican as anything less than a fullon exemplar of grace.

BY ANNIE BRIENING