EXCITEMENT ON PELEE ISLAND
Numerous white pelicans spotted
American white pelicans are moving into Pelee Island and other Lake Erie islands.
As one of the largest birds in North America, the pelicans stand out off Canada’s most southern community, which is better known to birdwatchers for its small, endangered prothonotary warbler.
“It’s really exciting, partly because it’s kind of a good news story in among all the declining songbird numbers,” Sachi Schott, an assistant bird bander with the Pelee Island Bird Observatory, said Monday.
In the last four years, the Pelee Island Bird Observatory has recorded sightings of the pelicans at the south end of the island, including a group of about 200 last year at Fish Point Provincial Nature Reserve. And birdwatchers saw pelican nests and eggs last year on nearby smaller islands.
“It looks like they might be here to stay,” Schott said.
The American white pelican, which can have a wing span of up to 290 centimetres, or more than nine feet, is a migratory bird found across the north-central and western United States. In Canada, the pelicans are known to breed across the Prairies and in northern Ontario and migrate south to the Gulf Coast states and Mexico for the winter. The pelicans would be at the northeastern edge of their range in Lake Erie, she said.
Schott doesn’t know why the threatened species seems to be expanding here but it has become the most asked-about bird at the observatory.
“I really like watching them. They kind of remind me of B-20 bombers or something when you see them come swooping in over the skyline.”
The pelicans are a regular sighting for researchers at the observatory, which has worked the large fish-eaters into its free, hands-on lessons for schoolchildren across Windsor and Essex County.
Last year the observatory changed its lessons from presentations to hands-on, curriculumbased activities geared to students from kindergarten to Grade 12. Since the fall, the free program has reached 5,200 students at about 70 different schools.
Sarah Keating, the observatory’s education co-ordinator, said it’s a more memorable experience. Students analyze bird-banding data and plot trends in a graph. Younger children, who tend to think all birds eat worms, can see how the pelican has a different beak for scooping up fish, she said. Sometimes the children play a migration game where they pretend to be a bird that needs places to stop along its route but notice they are fewer spots.
“We can talk about landscape change affecting our birds until we’re blue in the face but until students actually see it and experience it for themselves, the concepts don’t set in as well. We’re finding our approach to hands-on, more experiential learning is benefiting the students’ understanding and how engaged they are.”
The Pelee Island Bird Observatory is trying to promote the work it does such as migration-monitoring research, breeding-bird studies and banding about 1,500 birds a year. The non-profit charitable organization began in 2003 and has a field station at the south end of Pelee Island. Keating can be reached at education@pibo.ca.