Weekend Spillery: Pelican Brief
Is the BP disaster in the Gulf of Mexico going to wipe out the brown pelican? Not globally, at least, writes Phil McKenna at the New Scientist:
The species as a whole isn’t about to go extinct as a result of the oil spill: as 400,000 out of a total global population of 650,000 live in Peru. Roughly 60 per cent of the subspecies Pelecanus occidentalis carolinensis breed along the Gulf coast, where many nest on the barrier islands off Louisiana that have already been exposed to oil.
The slicks threaten the birds and their fragile wetland habitat only a few months after brown pelicans were removed from the US federal endangered and threatened species list in November last year. The birds had been on the list since 1970 after the pesticide DDT poisoned and nearly wiped out pelicans across the country. At the time Louisiana, where the pelican is the official state bird, lost its entire population. After years of resettling individual birds from Atlantic coast populations, Louisiana was able to boast the largest brown pelican population of any Gulf state, with 16,000 nesting pairs in 2004.
Just a small clarification: it’s true that Louisiana’s brown pelicans were just removed from the endangered list in November 2009. But the Alabama, Florida, and the Atlanta coast populations were taken off the list in 1985.
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