234 OUT WITH THE BIRDS 



cans and snow geese and gulls, also the mighty 

 whooping crane, black-tipped pinions. 



To be appreciated, the pelican must be seen 

 high in air, up where he has sea-room for his 

 great wings these together making an eight- 

 foot expanse of feather planes. His straight- 

 away gait is an easy sail-and-flap sort of pro- 

 gression. With a few strong, apparently slow 

 strokes of his wings, then a little sail, easy and 

 graceful, but eating up distance wondrously, he 

 drifts along, but occasionally in ascending or de- 

 scending, he soars and circles jauntily as well. In 

 rising from the water he is a joke, grotesquely 

 comical. Like most swimmers when getting under 

 way, he makes use of his feet to kick himself up 

 into the air, but unlike the others, he kicks back 

 with both feet at once, and goes off over the water 

 for a few yards with a ludicrous bobbity-bob, 

 spat-spat-spat. Even when clear of the water, he 

 bobs jerkily for a time, as he beats the air, and 

 this, coupled to the fact that he is stumpy of 

 body, short of tail, and big of head and beak, 

 makes him show to disadvantage at close quar- 

 ters. Also the weight of his forward parts is so 

 great that to trim his craft, he tips up his body 

 and sits back as it were, in a posture rather un- 



