Pelican

The famous pouch

The pelican’s distinctive throat pouch (the gular pouch) is its most iconic feature — a stretchy skin pouch attached to the lower bill that can expand to hold up to 11 liters of water and fish. It serves several functions:

• Fishing net — scooped through water to catch fish.
• Drainage — water drains out before swallowing.
• Cooling — pelicans flutter the pouch to dissipate heat.
• Display — males inflate it during courtship.
• Chick feeder — partially-digested fish carried in the pouch for chicks.

A 19th-century limerick captured the pouch’s wonder:

A wonderful bird is the pelican, his beak holds more than his belican.

Two hunting styles

Pelican species split into two hunting strategies:

• Plunge-divers — brown pelicans dive headfirst from heights up to 20 meters, hitting the water with explosive impact. Air sacs in the chest cushion the impact; modified eye membranes protect against shock. Their precision-guided dives are spectacular to watch.

• Cooperative scoopers — American white pelicans, Australian pelicans, and others fish in groups, herding fish into shallow water and scooping them up cooperatively. They don’t dive from height.

A species recovered

The brown pelican came perilously close to extinction in the 1960s due to DDT contamination — the pesticide thinned eggshells, causing widespread reproductive failure. Populations on the U.S. Pacific and Gulf coasts collapsed.

After DDT was banned in 1972, populations have recovered dramatically. Brown pelicans were removed from the U.S. endangered species list in 2009. Today they’re abundant at U.S. and Mexican coastal piers, often befriended by fishing-boat crews and tourists who feed them scraps.

Eight species worldwide

The genus Pelecanus contains eight species:

• Brown pelican (Americas)
• American white pelican (North America)
• Great white pelican (Eurasia, Africa)
• Pink-backed pelican (Africa)
• Spot-billed pelican (South Asia)
• Australian pelican
• Dalmatian pelican (Eurasia, large)
• Peruvian pelican (Pacific coast, large)

The Dalmatian pelican is among the world’s largest flying birds, with wingspan over 3 meters.