One of the pleasures of Australian life is to look up and see pelicans “surfing the thermals”, soaring, spiralling ever-higher, with so very little apparent effort.
They are also wonderful to watch as they take off from water (or land on it); then, however, a great amount of effort is spectacularly evident.
Pelicans are one of “our” world’s largest, living, flying “machines”.
Australia’s pelicans generally “enjoy” a “boom and bust” existence; some of them fly vast distances to reach places with enough food to sustain them, particularly the places/occasions where food is available for long enough to enable them to breed.
In “boom time” one can see hundreds, even thousands of pelicans at a single location.
When “boom time” ends too quickly, many of them starve, as “pelican paradise” becomes “pelican boneyard”.
A few weeks thereafter, the very same location may not see more than a handful of pelicans for many years…sometimes, not even a single, living one.
In certain Australian places, however, one almost always encounters pelicans, easily.
The Coorong is one such place.
This post and its seagull sequel are the fruit of our most recent visit to the Coorong, on 30 March 2022.
(For obvious reasons – as South Australian-raised West Australians – my beloved and I had not been able to visit SA for more than two years. I am unsure precisely when I first visited the Coorong, but it was certainly more than 60 years ago. For as long as I can remember, it has been one of my favourite places)
If you have never experienced the Coorong, click this for “6 things you might not know”…
Pelicanus conspicillatus – Australia’s own/only pelican – is not the biggest-bodied pelican, but its bill is the biggest of any living avian species.
As I type, one of the largest recorded Australian pelican breeding events is taking place at Lake Brewster in New South Wales.
Click here to learn more, and to see some of its “more than thirty thousand pelicans”.
