American White Pelican

About the American White Pelican

The American White Pelican is one of the largest birds in North America - a twenty-pound white bird with black flight feathers and a nine-foot wingspan, yet in the air it is pure grace: squadrons ride thermals in slow, synchronized spirals, flashing white then nearly vanishing as they turn edge-on.

Unlike the plunge-diving Brown Pelican, White Pelicans never dive. They fish swimming, dipping their great pouched bills, and often cooperatively - a line or crescent of birds paddles forward together, herding fish into shallows where every pouch scoops at once. The pouch holds three gallons, twice what the stomach can, and functions as a dip net, not a storage bag.

Breeding adults grow one of the oddest ornaments in the bird world: a fibrous plate, the "nuptial tubercle", standing up from the top of the bill like a fin, shed once eggs are laid. They breed colonially on remote lake islands of the northern plains and mountain West, with a small resident colony population on the Texas coast.

Across Texas the species is mainly a migrant and winter bird from October through April, rafting by the hundreds on reservoirs and coastal bays statewide. A spiraling kettle of White Pelicans catching noon light - visible for miles - is among the most elegant sights in the winter sky.