Story Behind the Photo: Brown Pelican

Today marks the one-year anniversary of the BP Deepwater-Horizon explosion that caused the largest accidental oil spill in history. There will likely be many retrospectives in the news today recapping the the disaster and it’s affects on the environment. I have no doubt that there will be footage of oiled birds, many of them pelicans, used to help punctuate the severity of the effect that the oil had on wildlife. With that in mind, I wanted to share a photo of a clean, happy, healthy Brown Pelican today.

Brown Pelicans might not be the most beautiful birds and are certainly not the most graceful, but they are unique. As the only dark pelican of seven worldwide species, the Brown Pelican is also one of few birds that incubates their eggs with their feet. They also hold the distinction of the only pelican in the world that dives into the water head-first to catch fish. It turns out that that what I thought was an ordinary shorebird isn’t so ordinary after all.

Days like today remind me to appreciate the beauty of nature and all of the wildlife in it, especially healthy pelicans.

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