White Pelicans: Shallow Water Fish Herders

This is the third in a series of articles about cooperative hunting by predators

The American white pelican provides another interesting example of animal cooperation, and wildlife enthusiasts have an excellent chance of observing this one at numerous pelican gathering locations across North America.         

White pelicans are a separate species from the brown pelicans that fly back and forth along Florida beaches, and they can be readily distinguished from them by their more colorful appearance and different feeding behavior.  White pelicans have white plumage with black wing tips and orange bills.  They scoop fish up in shallow water instead of diving on them from the air like their grayish-brown pelican cousins.  White pelicans are also substantially larger than brown pelicans, and their eight to nine and a half foot wingspan makes them one of the largest flying birds in the world.     

The white pelican’s winter range includes South Florida and the entire Gulf Coast, and most of them fly north and summer in a broad swath of the United States and Canada that extends as far east as Wisconsin and Northern Ontario.  However, small groups do occasionally visit Michigan, and the Shiawassee National Wildlife Refuge in Saginaw County has been the most consistent place to see them in recent years.  One of these pelicans stayed unusually late last year, and the photograph shows it swimming in the nearby Saginaw River in early December. 

I was not aware of the white pelican’s cooperative behavior until some friends and I stopped and watched the wading birds in a shallow lagoon on Sanibel Island, Florida several years ago.   All of a sudden 16 or 18 white pelicans flew to a fishy-looking part of the lagoon, formed a half-circle against the shoreline, and began flapping their wings and wading toward the shore.  In effect they were closing a trap and forcing the surrounded fish to try to break out between closely-spaced pelicans or get herded up onto a mud flat.  The pelicans constantly dropped their heads into the water and scooped fish into their pouches during this drive, and when it was over they flew back to scattered locations around the lagoon.  The same pelicans provided a repeat performance later in the morning that removed any doubt that this cooperation had been purposeful.   

After this experience I was not surprised to observe the same sort of cooperation when I encountered white pelicans again 1,700 miles to the north.  This occurred in June of 2007 when a group of us boated up Ontario’s Lake Nipigon to the mouth of the Wabinosh River and found a flock of white pelicans where we planned to fish.  These pelicans obviously had a rookery on some nearby reef, and we observed them trying to catch walleye and other fish for hours while we did the same thing a few hundred feet away. 

It quickly became apparent that most of the river was too fast and deep for the pelicans to conduct drives or catch many fish.   However, small groups of pelicans gathered in a couple of relatively quiet and shallow areas near the riverbank and conducted short drives that included the familiar wing flapping and quick jabs to scoop fish into their pouches.   These drives were not nearly as long or impressive as the ones that I had observed in Florida, but the pelicans were obviously performing the same sort of maneuver and catching fish doing it.                                    

The literature on American white pelicans contains a large amount of information on this cooperative behavior and describes the same type of fish herding that I observed in Florida and Ontario.  It also indicates that other white pelican species cooperate in the same general way in Asia, Australia, Africa, and Eastern Europe. 

American white pelicans have been expanding their breeding range eastward in Canada, and the birds that I observed on Lake Nipigon were from one of the species’ newest and most easterly breeding colonies.  This eastward expansion suggests that our own white pelican visitors could eventually establish breeding colonies in Michigan. 

Two years after my Lake Nipigon experience a research team made the long boat trip to the north end of the lake and collected feathers and other samples from the Wabinosh colony and Lake Nipigon’s other three pelican colonies.  They performed this work to help develop genetic profiles of Ontario’s pelicans and determine where the birds in new colonies were coming from. They received partial financial support from the New York City-based Explorers Club.  This type of project combining private support and citizen volunteers will become increasingly important as public funding dwindles.

Lake Nipigon is a more challenging place to see white pelicans than most people would enjoy, but I can confirm that the Ding Darling National Wildlife Refuge on Sanibel Island, Florida and certain parts of the Everglades National Park make excellent winter viewing locations.

Bill Taylor

President

Photo caption: White pelican on the Saginaw River at the Shiawassee National Wildlife Refuge last December.

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