A recent find, by birder Barb Putnam, of a Brown Pelican in Fourth Lake in the Adirondacks is the first record of that species from that region of New York State. The Syracuse Post-Standard has the story (and some nutty comments).
Corey is a New Yorker who lived most of his life in upstate New York but has lived in Queens since 2008. He's only been birding since 2005 but has garnered a respectable life list by birding whenever he wasn't working as a union representative or spending time with his family. He lives in Forest Hills with Daisy and Desmond Shearwater. His bird photographs have appeared on the Today Show, in Birding, Living Bird Magazine, Bird Watcher's Digest, and many other fine publications. He is also the author of the American Birding Association Field Guide to the Birds of New York.
The origin of this bird should be seriously questioned, the problem is the bird is gone…
Just read through the comments… Yikes!
Ack! Just as finish writing the above comments, the bird was found again on another lake. According to the report it seems quite friendly, hanging out on peoples docks and jumping on kayaks. Doesn’t sound like a wild bird to me.
While on a 6 day kayaking trip from Lake Lila to Little Tupper Lake, my family encountered the brown pelican at campsite 10 on the very Eastern tip of Lowe’s Lake, just above the Upper Lowe’s Dam. It stayed around our campsite begging for fish, and flew over to every passing canoe, but always returned to us. We tried to feed it a frog, but it being a young bird, it did not recognize it as food. We figured it to be a female by the bill length, and thought it to 1 or 2 years old. It was banded, band # 0938-16177. We knew all of this because, by a strange coincidence, my mom rehabilitated and raised brown pelicans (when they were still endangered due to DDT) and other seabirds at the Suncoast Seabird Sanctuary in FL, over 20 years ago.
After the bird overnighted at our site, we knew it would die unless it was helped. So on the morning of the 26th of August, my mom caught the pelican and we kayaked down the Bog River to the Lower Lowe’s Dam. At the dam, my mom hitchhiked with the bird to the nearby Wild Center. However, they would not take the bird, or give it fish, so she took it to the High Peaks Animal Hospital to work with a rehabilitator.
We hope that the pelican is alright, and does not end up over wintering in captivity, but is shipped down south where it belongs. I believe it should not be any farther north than North Carolina. It must have been swept north by the recent hurricane. How it managed to find probably the only former pelican rehabilitator in the Adirondacks is the real question.
Please contact me at zac1zac@gmail.com if you hear anything about how the bird is doing, as my family lives in Ipswich, MA, and does not hear the news from Upstate New York that often.
I just saw a pelican fly by me up in North Creek, NY. I thought to myself, “Are there pelicans in the Adirondacks?” I thought I would look it up, because I didn’t think so, and I found this website. I’m not a birder but I know what I saw.
@Danielle: Please take a couple moments and jot down exactly what you saw that made you think you saw a pelican fly by: if you did indeed see a pelican in North Creek it is a rare sighting and of interest to the ornithological/birdwatching community.