The California Brown Pelican 



Taken on Anacapa Island 



TAKING THE AIR 



Photo by the Author 



down for a season, the birds haul out on a sand-bar or other lonely spot 

 and ruminate. Here they stand in solemn companies with bills depressed, 

 for the weight of these members is quite too great to permit of their 

 being carried incessantly at right angles; and here they survey an ap- 

 proaching stranger like myopic grandfathers peering over an array of 

 befogged spectacles. Or else, if the way is quite clear, the Pelican turns 

 his head about and lays his bill comfortably along his back for a snooze : 

 or else, in the last stage of relaxation, he squats upon the ground and 

 disposes of both neck and bill in a jack-knife fold which rests upon the 

 back. 



If the casual acquaintance with these fowls permitted by shore-line 

 loiterings is seductive, a visit to their haunts at nesting time is rewarding 

 in the extreme. Not elsewhere, save upon some separate planet, may 

 the observer hope to obtain such an impression of the utterly different. 

 Indeed, a Pelican rookery at the height of the season is a chapter from 

 the Mesozoic age — nothing less. Here man is the outlaw, the anomaly; 

 and, save for the dire portent of his presence, life in a pelicanry moves off 

 in obedience to alien standards. Its very dimensions seem grotesque and 

 unreal. There is no point of contact with previous experience; and the 

 visitor, whether fortified by scientific purpose, or urged only by the vulgar 

 curiosity which afflicts our kind, knows that he is an outsider, an intruder, 



1975 



