292 BULLETIN 121, UNITED STATES NATIONAL MUSEUM. 



ing salt water bayous, estuaries, and shallow bays, where it is very 

 conspicuous at a long distance standing in the shoals or on the sand 

 flats, looming up large and white among its smaller companions. 

 It finds abundant food in the warm and shallow waters of the Gulf 

 coast and secure roosting places on the sand bars and small islands, 

 where it often congregates in large numbers, pursuing its own pe- 

 culiar methods of fishing and indulging in its favorite pastime of 

 aerial evolutions. 



In closing I must quote Doctor Chapman's (1908) tribute to the 

 antiquity of pelicans: 



We must also accord to pelicans that respectful attention which is the due 

 of extreme age. Pelicans became pelicans long before man became man, a 

 study of the distribution of the eleven existing species leading to the conclu- 

 sion that at least as late as the latter part of the Tertiary period our white 

 pelican, and doubtless also other species, presented much the same appearance 

 as it does to-day. 



Of the eight Old AVorld species, the one inhabiting southern Europe so 

 closely resembles our American white pelican that early ornithologists regarded 

 them as identical. Nevertheless, the localities at which their ranges are nearest 

 are separated by some 8,000 miles. Such close resemblance, however, is neither 

 an accident of birth or breeding. Pelicans did not appear independently in 

 the two hemispheres. Birds so like each other and so unlike other existing 

 birds must have a common ancestry. Conimon ancestry implies, at some time, 

 continuity of range, and with the European and American white pelican we 

 may well believe this to have occurred in that later portion of the Tertiary 

 period, when a warm-temperate or even subtropical circumpolar climate existed. 

 At this time, the pelican, from which we assume that the European and Ameri- 

 can white pelicans have both descended, inhabited the shores of the Arctic 

 Ocean. 



Eventually, by those climatic changes, resulting from a continuously decreas- 

 ing amount of heat and culminating in the Ice Age, the individuals of this 

 hypothetical polar pelican were forced southward, some in Europe, some in 

 America, but whether at the same time or not is unknown. 



Should some swing of the tenu>erature pendulum ever reestablish the pre- 

 glacial polar climate, the European and American pelicans, following in the 

 wake of an advancing favorable isotherm, may meet again on the shores of 

 the Polar Sea (whether as two species or one, who can say?) ; but in the mean- 

 time we look on them with special interest as but slightly differentiated from 

 the bird which fished in the Arctic Ocean before, so far as we know, man ap- 

 peared upon the scene. 



DISTRIBUTION. 



Breeding range. — Lake regions of the western interior. East and 

 south to central Manitoba (Lake AVinnipegosis), central North Da- 

 kota (Chase Lake), northwestern Wyoming (Yellowstone Lake), 

 northern Utah (Great Salt Lake), western Nevada (Pyramid Lake), 

 and southern California (Salton Sea). Formerly south to north 

 central Wisconsin (Lincoln County, 1884), central western Minne- 

 sota (Grant County, 1878), South Dakota, and Colorado. West to 

 the interior of California (Buena Vista, Tulare, Eagle, and Tule 



