TJ Ray

By TJ Ray

Columnist

 

Consider the thought that all creatures have two faces, one attractive and one otherwise.  I, for example, have two faces, the best of which can be seen in a dark room with the lights off.  

What an animal is doing sharpens a perception of it.  For instance, a tiger resembles a big kitten in an insurance commercial but doesn’t look so gentle or serene when biting into an antelope.

A fine example of a bird with two faces is the Great Blue Heron.  Standing on a rock beside a spillway looking for lunch, it is the epitome of ugly:  scrawny legs ending in very strange feet, wet feathers draped around a slim body, the feathers that float out of the back of its head streaming wildly in the breeze.  Even with a big fish trapped crosswise in his beak he is far from handsome.  

Ah, but when he has flipped the fish up a time or two and gulped it and begins to flap his wings, a transformation strikes, and off he goes with his skinny landing gear tucked back and his great wings pumping.

Out in the water of the spillway float a flotilla of white birds apparently paddling randomly here and there, using their little flat yellow feet to hold them in place against the rushing water, floating on air sacks in their bodies, which gives them buoyancy.   

Around in all directions each floats, not looking straight down in the water.  But now and again, Bingo!, his whole head ducks under, offering a very strange looking sight of wings and tail, sometimes six or eight birds diving simultaneously.   On good dives up he comes a fish in a great yellow-orange bill.

At times, the fish will lie there in the bottom of the great maw, no doubt wondering what the heck is going on.  Little does he know that very soon he will slide down into a very dark cavern.  Before that, however, Mr. Pelican must orient his lunch so that it slides easily down the hatch.  

It may take some time as he’s not as proficient as the Great Blue Heron.  In fact, he doesn’t flip his catch but sort of nudges it around in his bill.  That operation is very tricky, especially when he has been lucky enough to come up with two fish at a time.

Evidently the pelicans keep an eye out on the gulls that are zooming around above them.  It is fairly common that a gull will drop its catch before eating it.  All the pelicans in the area will paddle or actually fly to the spot where the unexpected goodie fell.  At times groups of pelicans will form a sort of skirmish line and drive fish against the rocks.

As each flavor of birds has distinctive features, perhaps the one displayed by the pelican is most notable—its beak, sometimes described as a distensible pouch.  The top is fixed, long and narrow.  The bottom is the amazing section. Made to expand when the bird dives its head for lunch, the bottom part may intake three gallons along with fish it catches.  Pointing his bill up allows the water to drain at the corners of his mouth.

Clumsy and ill-designed as pelecanus erythrorhynchas may seem, it efficiently collects four pounds of food a day to sustain its 10- to -17 pound body.  In between looking for fish, the pelican stays busy taking off and landing.  Taking off begins with a flap of its 8- or 9-foot wings, which raised its feet in the water.  Taking one or two steps, both feet together, it hops across the water while the wings flap.  

And, voila, a miracle happens.  A very clumsy water bird becomes a beautiful aerial artist, legs tucked back, the wings doing their job and exposing the black feathers across their edges for the first time.

At times, several dozen pelicans will launch together.  One starts moving, another following, until the group is flying strung out in the air.  Then they do an amazing thing: the whole flock spirals upward in a wide circle, until sometimes they are too high to see.

But eventually they come back to feed.  Mr. Pelican will glide down, often a half foot off the water until he decides its time to put down.  Then he slowly brings down both feet and just before striking water, raises them to oppose the water.  Water meeting feet makes for a small collision.  And he’s down!

A while ago the humorist poet Ogden Nash was given credit for a poem extolling the pelican.  Truth is the poem was penned in 1910 by Dixon Lanier Merritt, the editor of the Nashville Tennessean morning paper.

“A wonderful bird is the pelican,

His bill will hold more than his belican,

He can take in his beak

Enough food for a week

But I’m damned if I see how the helican!”