Endangered Pelicans Hatching a Comeback on Offshore Islands

VENTURA — This is a time of rebirth for a graceful prehistoric bird once nearly wiped out by a virulent pesticide, but now flourishing on the rugged cliffs and wind-swept plateaus of two isolated islands off the Ventura coast.

Though still listed as a federal endangered species, California brown pelicans by the thousands are courting and nesting on West Anacapa Island, a nature preserve closed to the public, and on tiny Santa Barbara Island 46 miles offshore.

Downy chicks, incubated by the heat of their parents’ webbed feet, are already hatching as the peak spring birthing season arrives. If estimates are correct, more than 3,000 fledglings will spread their wings and fly away by late summer.

“It is like a giant maternity ward; a nursery, really,” said Paige Martin, a biologist in charge of the seabird monitoring program at Channel Islands National Park in Ventura.

That is quite a change from 1970, when bets were that brown pelicans on both the East and West coasts would join other creatures of the prehuman era as victims of the human world.

That year, just one chick on West Anacapa, the primary West Coast rookery, survived long enough to leave the nest. And only five chicks survived in Southern California and northern Baja California.

Things looked so bad for the brown pelican in the U.S., in fact, that its demise created a national furor that helped lead to the 1972 ban of DDT and passage of the Endangered Species Act in 1973.

The brown pelican, bald eagle and peregrine falcon--once all commonly found in Southern California--suffered horrendously as DDT caused their egg shells to grow so thin they were easily crushed during incubation.

The birds came upon the pesticide indirectly through the fish they ate. Anchovies, brown pelicans’ favorite food locally, were laden with the poison, which was washed into the ocean from Southland farms and piped miles off the Palos Verdes Peninsula by a large pesticide manufacturer.

New evidence shows that DDT is still killing the Channel Islands’ eagles and harming peregrine falcons chicks. But the pesticide has apparently been less of a lasting problem for the brown pelican.

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Although experts say pelican eggs are still uncommonly thin, a decline in anchovies is now the primary reason that brown pelicans do not produce enough young to be officially declared a stable population and taken off the nation’s list of endangered or threatened wildlife.

Yet, the brown pelican, a poster bird of the budding environmental movement three decades ago, is today generally considered a conservation success story.

On the East Coast, the pelicans have come back to such an extent that they were declared recovered in 1985, and protective measures removed. The West Coast recovery has been less dramatic, but it is still noteworthy, scientists say.

“I think it is a success story. It is one of the few endangered species in the country that has shown encouraging signs of recovery,” said Dan Anderson, a UC Davis biologist who has studied the brown pelican here since 1971.

Former UC Davis biologist Franklin Gress, who has studied West Anacapa pelicans more than anyone else, said from Santa Barbara Island last week that he considers the local pelican population stable, despite lower birth rates here than on the East Coast or in Mexico.

“We’re a little hesitant to say, ‘Yes, it’s a 100% success,’ but there’s been a lot of improvement,” he said. “They’re recovering nicely, but they’re still vulnerable.”

Gress and Anderson both support the reclassification of the brown pelican from endangered to threatened because the bird’s numbers rebounded so quickly once DDT was banned.

Over the five years ending in 1973, an average of only 722 pairs nested in Southern California and northern Baja. But those numbers surged to about 6,500 from 1985 to ‘89, when food was especially plentiful. The number hovers between 5,000 and 6,000 today, the scientists estimated.

The U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service began updating its data on the species in 1995, anticipating a reclassification of the California brown pelican to threatened, or perhaps its removal altogether as a protected species, said biologist David Pereksta, who did the study.

That work ground to a halt because of federal budget cuts, but might be renewed in the next year or two, he said.

“The [pelican] recovery plan projected that Anacapa might be able to support 3,000 pairs and that number has been routinely surpassed,” said Ventura-based Pereksta. And even though the number of fledglings per nest is only two-thirds of that in Mexico, Gress said the rate of chick survival here has been consistent since the mid-1980s.

Still, the number of nesting pairs on the Channel Islands dropped precariously to only a few hundred in three El Nino years--1984, 1990 and 1992--as anchovies avoided the warmer waters, Pereksta said.

Anderson and other pelican experts also are studying the sudden deaths of about 1,500 brown pelicans killed by botulism at the Salton Sea last summer. And they are taking a long look at the gradual decline of anchovies near the Channel Islands.

“It’s just like Roseanne Roseannadanna used to say on ‘Saturday Night Live,’ ‘It just goes to show you, it’s always something,’ ” Anderson said. “With the pelican, it’s always something. If it isn’t DDT, it’s the potential of oil [contamination] or changes in the food supply or the activities of man.”

Today the greatest threats to the species--which numbers about 100,000 when the crowded rookeries in mainland Mexico and the Gulf of California are counted--exist mostly in Mexico, Anderson said. Invasion of nesting areas by man has driven brown pelicans off some islands completely, and the Mexican government is inconsistent in its protection, he said.

That cannot be said about the Channel Islands National Park. Special permits are required before visitors can journey to the West Anacapa preserve. The three-hour boat trip to Santa Barbara Island, and a permit required to leave hiking trails there, keep intruders at bay.

That is why experts like Martin, Gress and Anderson are among a handful of people who have actually seen brown pelicans as they court, mate and incubate their 4-inch-long eggs by cupping them beneath their feet.

The whole process takes about five or six months for a pelican pair, some of whom match up year after year if their mating is successful, Anderson said.

“If they failed, they will get a divorce,” he said. “But if they succeeded, they would both return to the island independently and go back to the same site. They would recognize each other and form the same bond. It’s uncommon, but it happens.”

After raising their young, the adults separate for a kind of winter vacation, venturing as far north as Washington state and as far south as Central America.

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On the Channel Islands, the season of reproduction sometimes lasts from January through October, as one group of pelicans after another rotates through.

About once a month during this period, Martin will take the long trip to tiny Santa Barbara Island to watch the large birds with a spotting scope.

Before she reaches the pelicans, she will pass the noisy nesting grounds of sea gulls and the smelly birthing grounds of sea lions. Finally, she will watch hundreds of pelicans build their nests of grass on a steep bluff 200 feet above the ocean.

The adult pelicans hardly ever vocalize, so the only noise except the wind, is the gravelly growl of contented chicks or the flapping of pelicans’ wings, which usually spread 7 feet from tip to tip.

The large birds often fly in formation, skimming 40 or 50 feet above the ocean, then plummeting into the sea to scoop up a beakful of fish for their young.

“I enjoy watching them fly along,” Martin said. “I know they’re drafting each other. I enjoy the purity of the scene.”