I’m sitting at home today with the whole family riddled with cold, a leaden sky hurling little pellets of hard rain at the windows, my new deluxe garden-bird feeding station attracting absolutely nothing but gusts of wind, and waiting for Mike’s report from the BIG weekend at Cape May to tell us all what a fabulous time he’s having…In fact, I seem to be doing very little at the moment bar transferring photo-galleries off my old blog onto our new 10,000 Clicks photo-galleries page (almost 90 galleries linked now!) and waiting for the sun to come out. Darn it I’m really not very good at handling this transition between summer and winter. However, I did just transfer a gallery taken on a beautiful ‘t-shirts and shorts’ morning at California’s Natural Bridges State Park, Santa Cruz, which raised a smile and made me feel warm and fuzzy again: so, for all of you sat indoors wondering if you’ll ever get out birding again, accept these photos as a little reminder that when conditions are good, they can be very good indeed. Cheers!

Brown Pelican Pelecanus occidentalis
Natural Bridges State Park, Santa Cruz, California. January 2006

“P. o. californicus differs from P. o. occidentalis and P. o. carolinensis by its larger size and red, rather than blackish metallic green color at the base of the gular pouch during courtship. The gular pouch colors are dark at other seasons. However, in Texas, D. Blankinship has reported that 5–10% of breeding P. o. carolinensis have red pouches and about 1% in Florida have red, orange, or yellow pouches.

In all subspecies, the iris is brown in juveniles and adults in non-breeding plumages. It lightens to straw white or light sky blue during nesting, but darkens to brown after the onset of incubation.

In all subspecies, the adult eyering is gray or gray-pink in non-breeding plumage, but changes to pink in breeding plumage. This color fades during incubation, becoming gray.”

[Adapted from Shields, M. 2002. BrownPelican (Pelecanus occidentalis). In The Birds of North America, No. 609 (A. Poole and F. Gill, eds.)]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

All photographs © Charlie Moores