"A significant die-off of brown pelicans in California has scientists searching for answers."
"They started showing up in odd places far from the ocean: in the middle of roads, backyards, even a major league baseball game. The wayward marine birds were cold, disoriented, anemic. The stomach of one that veterinary surgeon Rebecca Duerr opened up was full of feathers and wood chips.
Up and down the coast, something was wrong with California’s brown pelicans, but no one was sure what. By the time they got to wildlife rehab centers such as International Bird Rescue, where Duerr works, many of the birds were “essentially on death’s door,” she said.
Nearly 900 brown pelicans were brought into wildlife rehabilitation centers from Southern California to the San Francisco Bay Area this past spring and summer, according to Duerr, with hundreds more dead in the wild. It’s an eyebrow-raising die-off — one of several in recent years — of a bird species that only in 2009 has recovered enough for the federal government to take it off the Endangered Species Act list."
Dino Grandoni reports for the Washington Post August 19, 2024.
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