A Brown Pelican at Columbus Lake

These days, it’s fortunate for us birders that our hobby can be a mostly solitary pursuit.  It’s also fortunate that group texting and social media make it possible for us to alert one another to unusual bird species occurring locally, so that everyone can have a chance to see rarities without traveling together in large groups.  I am part of one of these birding networks—although I don’t often think of it in that way—in northeast-central Mississippi, and several of the interesting sightings that I had this spring were the result of following up on messages from local birders.  Some of these birders were able to see birds that I reported, as well, so everyone benefited.

One of these sightings was of a Brown Pelican at Columbus Lake on May 4.  After I received messages from friends who had seen this bird, I decided to head over to the lake that afternoon to try my luck at spotting it, too.

I knew that the pelican was rare, of course; Brown Pelicans are coastal birds that are seldom seen very far inland.  They are considered rare but regular vagrants in inland Mississippi.  Interestingly, the individual birds that wander from the coast are usually the immatures and subadults—maybe because they are testing their limits, as young humans tend to do?  It’s a plausible enough theory.  Regardless of their reasons for straying inland, Brown Pelicans tend not to remain there for very long.

Finding an enormous water bird on an open lake doesn’t sound all difficult, maybe, but I didn’t immediately see the rare pelican when I arrived.  I did see a Bald Eagle, an Osprey, and several Great Egrets and Great Blue Herons winging through, though.  A flock of White Ibises flew overhead, and several songbirds—a Brown Thrasher, a Yellow Warbler, an Orchard Oriole, a few Red-winged Blackbirds, etc.—added their music to the ambiance.

After a few minutes of searching, I spotted the Brown Pelican landing on the open water.

I took this photo after the pelican landed.

It was settled there for less than a minute before flying off to a sandbar with over a dozen American White Pelicans.  Although it’s difficult to determine scale from the photos, this bird’s wingspan is over six feet.  It’s a subadult, so its coloration is duller than a fully adult Brown Pelican’s would be.

Up again...

Below this paragraph is a picture showing the Brown Pelican hanging out with a bunch of white pelicans.  Unlike the Brown Pelican, the American White Pelican is a mostly inland species that prefers freshwater and brackish habitats to saltwater ones.  During winter and migration, there are often hundreds of American White Pelicans on large lakes in inland Mississippi.  I suspect that the lone Brown Pelican’s interactions with the American White Pelicans were limited to roosting, since the two species have wildly different foraging behaviors; white pelicans scoop up prey while swimming, while Brown Pelicans usually fly high above the water and dive for their fish.  Really, they’re both impressively adapted to their typical environments.

In this image, the Brown Pelican is about the third pelican from the right.

The Brown Pelican seemed pretty content on the sandbar, and it was getting a little late in the day, so I left the lake.  The pelican left the lake, too—after several days of residence there.  I can’t say exactly where it is now, but I hope it made its way back to the coast.  Maybe it has been observed in passing (as it would be an unsurprising sighting there) by the coastal birders who are busy touching base with each other—at a distance!—with their bird reports.