This Month's Story
Nature showed her dark side to us with a flock of terns that once brooded in the woods by one of the small ponds a short distance from the house. These lovely shore birds are pretty to watch feeding. Their wings beating, they hover over the water, then plunging headfirst they scoop up a fish. Oddly enough, unlike gulls, these terns can’t swim.
One evening, I saw the flock swoop low over the house in a large swing that took them across the beach road and out over the water. As they began to pass over the road, birds began to abruptly fall from the sky, hitting the road and falling into the water. I ran down to the road and found birds strewn about the street, unconscious, decapitated or with a wing cut off.
I heard a rush of wings and looked up.
They were coming by once more and again the same thing occurred. This time I could see what was happening. They were striking the electric wires strung alongside the road and like the shavings of some horrible pencil sharpener, they were falling to the ground.
The flock did not return and I looked about me on the road. There were about thirty birds and parts of birds scattered about. I called Stella and together we started putting the birds’ bodies in black plastic trash bags. Someone from a car, stopped by the carnage, helped. We said very little; we were stunned. Some of the birds were still alive and we had to put these down with a mallet.
When we were through, I felt sick. What could have happened? Could some type of electric field from the wires have somehow confused them in their flight? Surely they must be able to see the wires. On occasion, I had seen a bird lying dead under the wires, but this was very rare and I had thought nothing about it. This time more than two dozen birds had been killed and there was no doubt that the wires were the mechanism that caused their deaths. The odd part was that they did not shy away from the wires as the birds started to fall, but kept moving in their long sweeping turns as if driven from behind.
The next day, I called local bird people and asked if they knew what could have caused this to happen. No one knew. I was referred to several national bird research groups and finally after a number of fruitless calls, I reached someone in a New York institution who seemed to be familiar with my problem.
“It’s a hawk.” he said. “It’s waiting till evening when the flock is tired and bedding down, then it routs them out. They are so startled, they don’t know what’s taking place, and they start to fly blindly. The hawk will run them in circles for a few minutes until they start hitting things. After that the hawk just takes his pick.”
“But I didn’t see a hawk.”
“He’s there,” he said. “It’ll happen again.”
It did about a week later and was more destructive than the first time. We saw the rapidly passing shadows on the floors and walls of the kitchen and immediately knew what was taking place. We ran out in time to see them fall on the road and in the water. Moments later the flock went by again and finally, a third time. I looked about and could see no hawk.
I looked out at the water. The injured birds were feebly splashing on the surface, and then, one by one, slipping under. Then I remembered the odd fact that these terns can’t swim. Soon the surface of the water was clear. I was reminded of watching large snowflakes falling on the water. For a brief moment the flakes are there, white against the water’s dark surface, and then are gone, as if nothing had ever been there.
The road was again littered with birds and bird parts. Stella and I went down as before and began putting the birds in plastic trash bags. Once again, people from stopped cars helped. Soon we had about five bags and I took them around to the back for the trashmen to collect.
It was over. It has not happened again. That run appeared to be the end of the local flock. We have seen these type of terns since, occasionally in small groups, but never as large a flock as had been here before the two downings.
The return of the pelicans to our beach was rather dramatic. One Sunday morning in early spring we sat taking coffee out on the side porch. Looking out over the water we were surprised to see what appeared to be twenty to twenty-five white life jackets floating high in the shallow water over by Carrere’s pier, a long wooden pier about 400 yards from our house. Our first thoughts were that a boat had overturned. Then: no, they were too white, too big, too many.
Then the “jackets” began to move.
Several cars on the beach road slowed; some stopped. Two of our neighbors joined us and we all watched with binoculars. The floating objects were American White Pelicans, huge birds with wings that can span more than nine feet! The birds stayed, mostly sleeping, for perhaps an hour, ignoring the to-do of the observers on the beach. Then, suddenly, with a noisy rush of wings, they lifted and as a group flew away. I have never seen the American Whites again, although I’m told they are around this coastal area.
However, that afternoon, I counted eleven Brown Pelicans sitting on pilings out on the water where none had been the day before. I had not seen a pelican, Brown or White, in the previous five years I had lived on the Coast. In the weeks that followed, more came and went, their number always increasing, until finally it seemed that every piling was capped by its own Brown Pelican.
I would sail my Sunfish to the large group of pilings a quarter mile directly in front of the house and, cutting through the pilings with Gretal (the Weimaraner we had back then) barking, shoo the roosting pelicans into flight. I enjoyed it; Gretal loved it. While not as large as the American White, the Brown has an impressive wingspan of more than seven feet and their flapping slow push to flight was a delight for both of us to see.
That summer in 1983, the Brown Pelicans reestablished themselves as a basic part of our coastal scene. It seems impossible now to consider the beach without them.
I was told later that the original recovery birds had been imported from Florida. From the core recovery birds, the present population has been generated. I am also told that they are as plentiful now as they were before DDT almost wiped them out. What a tragedy we had so narrowly avoided.
I’d never thought too much of pelicans in the years I spent at sea. The birds were there when the ship docked, and although not noisy birds like seagulls, they were the trite subject of souvenir beach shops, always posed sitting on posts with a bit of nautical-looking rope wrapped around the base. In those commercial displays, they were seldom shown in flight and, if they were, the presentation was static to the point of being dull.
There is, of course, the whimsical poem by, I believe, Dixon Merritt that makes the bird into a bit of a clown: “A wonderful bird is the pelican, / His bill can hold more than his belly can …”.
The result was that to me, pelicans appeared ungainly enough to be ugly. But now as they took up residence in front of our home, I began to watch them, and I found that I had been in error. They are neither ungainly nor ugly; they are beautiful birds with an inherent grace in their movement.
As I watched, I found something not seen in the static displays of the souvenir shops, something only appreciated when the birds are seen in motion.
They are beautiful in flight.
I would watch a pelican skimming impossibly low over the water, and except for slight feather corrections, remaining absolutely motionless, falling in a long, drawn out, perfectly controlled manner, floating on a weakening cushion of air, that holds the bird as it glides on and on, sinking lower and lower. Then at the last possible moment, the bird would catch itself and, with several quick flaps of its wings, rise up to a height above the water of eight to ten feet, where it again begin its long, beautifully graceful, skimming, controlled fall/glide.
Sometimes they do this alone, sometimes in groups of three or four, one behind the other. When the time comes for the leader to flap, he flaps and rises, then the second one does the same, then the third and fourth, like a graceful syncopated line of ballet dancers.
When they fly high they usually do it in groups, sometimes of only two or three, sometimes of ten or more. But when they do, it is often in a line of brown birds en echelon, the front one absorbing the air resistance for the others, the group undulating in beautiful, graceful waves as they fly.
They have a rather festive beauty when they fish. In loose groups, they hover about ten to twelve feet over the water, making short sweeps before one, then another, and then another, would drop as stones. In falling, their heads remained oriented toward the targeted fish so that they sometimes twist in an awkward spiral as they fall, hitting the surface in sharp explosions.
There the birds will sit for several moments, their neck extended up as they gulp their prey, before first one then another launches itself up in the air again for more
(PAUL: I have over the years written many stories about the wonderful birds around us. If you like what I have written so far, send me a note and I will include more of them in my story column.)
