49 Fun Facts About Pelican

What is a pelican's throat pouch actually used for?

Catching prey and draining off water: the bird tips its bill down to let the water run out, then tosses its head back and swallows the fish at once, carrying nothing away.

A famous limerick says a pelican's bill can hold more than its what?

Belly: 'his bill will hold more than his belican' is no joke, because a full pouch takes two or three times what the stomach can, most of it water that has to be tipped out.

How do white pelicans hunting as a team usually trap their prey?

Herding fish into the shallows: the birds swim in a line or a horseshoe, beating their wings on the water to drive the shoal ahead, then simply scoop up the trapped fish.

DNA studies show the pelicans' closest living relatives to be which pair of odd-looking birds?

Shoebill and hamerkop: pelicans were long classed with other seabirds that share their fully webbed feet, until DNA showed that kind of foot had evolved more than once.

The Greek for 'pelican' is linked to the word for 'axe' and to which other bird's name?

Woodpecker: it hacks at trees like an axe, and the pelican may have been given a similar name for the shape of its own great bill.

A 30-million-year-old pelican fossil from France surprised scientists because which part was almost identical to a living bird's?

Its beak: the fish-scooping bill already suited its job so well that tens of millions of years of evolution have barely altered it.

Which continent is the only one with no pelicans?

Antarctica: pelicans keep to warm and temperate waters, but not just the coast, since white pelicans nest on lakes far inland in both North America and Australia.

Which author wrote the 1992 legal thriller 'The Pelican Brief', filmed with Julia Roberts?

John Grisham: the 'brief' is a law student's theory that two judges were murdered to swing a court case over oil drilling in marshland where endangered pelicans nest.

Which bird has the longest bill of any living bird, up to half a metre?

The Australian pelican: a big male's bill reaches about half a metre, and the pouch slung beneath it doubles as a rain-catcher when the bird wants a drink.

Why do bulky pelicans float so high in the water?

Air pockets in the skeleton and under the skin: they keep it riding high like a cork, and to stay dry it rubs its head on an oil gland near the tail and wipes the waterproofing over its feathers.

Where do normally silent adult pelicans turn noisy and start grunting?

At the breeding colony: there the adults grunt and the begging chicks keep up a constant din, yet away from the nest a pelican rarely utters more than a hiss.

The Californian brown pelican's throat pouch turns which colour before breeding?

Bright red: only the part of the pouch nearest the throat flushes, and the colour drains away again as soon as the eggs are laid and the courting is over.

The American white pelican grows what on its bill in the breeding season?

A prominent knob: the flat, horn-like plate stands up from the top of the bill through courtship and then simply drops off once the eggs have been laid.

How do pelicans shed excess heat?

Gular flutter of the throat and pouch skin: with the bill held open, the rippling pouch lets moisture evaporate and carry heat away, turning the fishing net into a radiator.

Pelicans ride thermals on the way to their feeding grounds; about how high have they been recorded soaring?

About 3,000 m: by circling up on one thermal and gliding down to the next, a pelican can commute 150 km or more to feed while barely flapping its wings.

Pelicans skimming low over water save energy through what phenomenon?

Ground effect: air squeezed between the wings and the water gives extra lift and cuts drag, which is why lines of pelicans skim so close to the wave tops.

Swans famously pair for life, but how long does a pelican couple stay together?

A single breeding season: even then the two are a couple only at the nest, flying off separately to feed, and each finds a new partner the following year.

Pelicans flock to breed at which outback salt lake when floods fill it?

Lake Eyre: the basin can lie dry for years, but when it fills the birds gather in their thousands, raise chicks on the sudden glut of fish, and move on as the water dries out again.

How do pelicans keep their eggs warm?

On their feet: both parents take shifts, and the first chick out is so much bigger than the rest that it usually takes most of the food and is often the only one to survive.

After about a week, how do pelican chicks feed?

Reaching deep into a parent's bill: the adult opens wide and the chick pushes its whole head inside to pull out regurgitated fish, a routine both parents keep up for weeks.

At a few weeks old, young ground-nesting pelicans gather in groups called what?

Pods or crèches: the chicks huddle together while both parents are away fishing, yet each returning adult still picks out and feeds only its own.

Studies of what pelicans eat find they usually take which fish?

Carp and mullet: fishermen have long blamed pelicans for thinning their catch, yet the birds usually take such 'rough' fish that people rarely want.

How does the brown pelican catch most of its fish?

Plunge-diving from the air: it spots a shoal from as high as 20 metres, folds back its wings and hits the water bill-first, surfacing moments later with a fish.

On some Greek lakes, pelicans let which diving birds do the work of driving fish up to the surface?

Cormorants: they dive deep and flush the shoal upwards, where the pelican, a bird that feeds only at the surface, is waiting to scoop the fish up.

Gulls sometimes land on pelicans' heads to do what?

Peck it and steal a fish from its bill: the thief strikes just after a dive, while the pelican is still draining its pouch and cannot yet swallow.

In which London park, home to pelicans since the 1660s, was one photographed swallowing a live pigeon?

St James's Park: the first pelicans there were a gift from the Russian ambassador to Charles II, and their successors are still handed fish every afternoon, pigeons being strictly off the menu.

The brown pelican was listed as endangered in the US in 1970 mainly because of what?

DDT pollution: the pesticide built up in the fish the birds ate and thinned their eggshells so badly that the eggs cracked under the weight of the sitting parents.

Which disaster hit brown pelicans months after they left the US endangered list?

Deepwater Horizon: the species came off the list in 2009 and the well blew out the next spring, fouling the mangrove islands where thousands of pelicans nested.

On British roads, what is a 'pelican crossing'?

A push-button pedestrian crossing: the name squeezes 'pedestrian light controlled' into a bird, and the joke stuck, since later designs were christened puffin and toucan crossings.

What everyday hazard injures pelicans that beg for scraps around piers and harbours?

Fishing hooks and line: a snagged bird is often simply cut loose, and the trailing line then winds round its bill, wings or legs until it can no longer feed.

Francis Drake's flagship set sail as the Pelican; by which name is she far better known?

The Golden Hind: Drake renamed her in mid-voyage to flatter his patron Sir Christopher Hatton, whose crest was a golden deer, and she went on to sail right round the world.

Only which seabirds have a wider wingspan than the biggest pelicans?

The great albatrosses: a great white pelican can span about three and a half metres, which is what lets so heavy a bird ride thermals for hours with barely a wingbeat.

Petros the pelican, rescued by fishermen in the 1950s, became the beloved mascot of which Greek island?

Mykonos: he patrolled the harbour for some thirty years, fed by the fishermen and photographed by every tourist, until a car killed him in 1985.

The Physiologus, an early Christian text, says a mother pelican revives her dead young with what?

Her own blood: in the tale she first strikes her unruly chicks dead, mourns them for three days, then pierces her own side to bring them back, which the Church read as an image of Christ.

In heraldry, a pelican shown standing in her nest with her brood of young is a pelican in her what?

Piety: the word can also mean dutiful love for one's own family, as in 'filial piety', a fitting label for a bird pictured on the nest with her brood.

Which English monarch wore a pelican jewel in a famous portrait, presenting herself as mother to her people?

Elizabeth I: unmarried and childless, she used the emblem to cast herself as mother of the whole nation, and the 'Pelican Portrait' is named after the jewel at her breast.

Which saint's hymn 'Adoro te devote' calls Christ the loving divine pelican?

Thomas Aquinas: the 13th-century friar addresses Jesus in it as 'Pie pellicane', kind pelican, and the verses were kept in the Roman Missal as a prayer for after Mass.

Oxford and Cambridge each have a college with a pelican on its arms, both named after which church festival?

Corpus Christi: the pelican had become the badge of that feast of the Eucharist, and the Oxford college still has a pelican sundial in its quad and a magazine called The Pelican Record.

The brown pelican is the state bird of which US state, nicknamed the Pelican State?

Louisiana: by the 1960s the Pelican State had lost almost all of its pelicans, and today's colonies descend from birds shipped in from Florida to restock it.

Pelican Books, launched in 1937, was the non-fiction imprint of which paperback publisher?

Penguin: its sixpenny paperbacks cost no more than a packet of cigarettes, and the Pelican list carried that idea into serious non-fiction, opening with a two-volume work by Bernard Shaw.

Europe's biggest pelican colonies nest in the Danube Delta, most of which lies in which country?

Romania: more than half of Eurasia's great white pelicans raise their young in the delta, flying in each spring from wintering grounds as far away as Africa.

The pelican logo of the German stationery company Pelikan came from what?

Günther Wagner's arms showed a pelican feeding three chicks; he made it four when his fourth child was born.

The NBA's Pelicans took that name in 2013; what had the franchise been called until then?

The Hornets: the name had travelled with the team from Charlotte, and once it was dropped Charlotte's own club claimed it back, so the old Bobcats are the Hornets again.

In the children's classic 'Storm Boy', what is the name of the boy's beloved pelican?

Mr Percival: he is one of three orphaned chicks the boy rears and sets free, and the only one that flies back to stay with him.

Which island's name comes from an old Spanish word for seabirds, usually translated as 'pelicans'?

Alcatraz: a Spanish explorer charting San Francisco Bay in 1775 named an island 'Alcatraces', a word that may have meant gannets or simply strange birds, and it stuck to the future prison rock.

In the King James Bible, which book contains the line 'I am like a pelican of the wilderness'?

Psalms: the lonely bird of Psalm 102 has never been identified for certain, and modern versions such as the NIV have quietly turned the pelican into a desert owl.

Brown pelicans have their own island subspecies in which Pacific archipelago?

The Galapagos: pelicans shun remote ocean islands almost everywhere else, yet here a local race of the brown pelican nests the whole year round.

Which woodcarver's 1686 reredos at St Mary Abchurch in London shows the 'pelican in her piety'?

A much earlier example survives in a c. 1350 mural at Belchamp Walter church in Essex.

In a Murri myth, a black pelican preparing for battle turned part-white by doing what?

Daubing on clay: tricked by a woman he had fallen for, he was whitening himself for war when another pelican, not knowing what the half-painted creature was, struck him dead.