Pelican Bounce

The Brown Pelican needs to bounce its feet off the water’s surface several times in order to get airborne. Here photographer Kevin Steen has captured the bird with its wings almost touching the water, together with the splash its feet made a moment earlier. With a wingspan of six to seven feet or more, these birds only weigh about seven or eight pounds, thanks to their hollow, air-filled bones. During the fall and winter months, park visitors may get lucky and see these birds, sometimes in great numbers, assembling and feeding in the North Basin (the cove between the park and the Berkeley mainland). The Brown Pelican is often cited as a conservation success story, due to its recovery after the ban on DDT, but it now faces other threats due to commercial overfishing of sardines, one of its main food sources when breeding, and due to ocean warming with climate change.

More about them: Wikipedia Cornell Audubon In Chavez Park

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