24 September 2013. Hamilton ON. There’s a now little used saying along the lines of, “Guests, like fish, begin to stink after three days.” Much as we all understand its context, such aphorisms are fading fast in our digitally abbreviated and celebrity-drenched world which adopts and almost just as quickly dumps, new pithy and useful phrases, discarded just like candy wrappers.
All of this has little to do with today’s birding excursion except that when I saw an American White Pelican where pelicans don’t belong, my reaction was just as much, Wow! as it was, Oh are you still here?
I had walked out to one of my favourite birding lookouts, actually the same place that prompted my previous posting on the Orange-crowned Warbler and Peregrine Falcon. And for sake of continuity from that story, some shorebirds, a dozen or so Lesser Yellowlegs, had shown up today, otherwise it was much the same mix: Great Egrets, Green-winged Teal, a bunch of Northern Shovelers and some Great Blue Herons. But in sweeping the vista to count the Great Egrets (seven) I found myself looking through my binoculars at a White Pelican swimming along quite happily.
A White Pelican was first spotted here about a month ago, it excited a lot of comment and the list compilers were quick to respond. But as time wore on and it lingered, so its celebrity status dwindled. Having heard nothing about it for weeks I’d assumed it had moved on, completing its migration from Northern Ontario or Manitoba to the Atlantic coast.
We see one or two American White Pelicans here every year and I can never quite get over how odd it is to see pelicans here at all, and not in tropical or semi-tropical waters in the company of fanciful literary beasts. That’s probably a hang-over from my childhood when Pelican was the children’s book trademark equivalent of Penguin; either that, or maybe also because they belonged in the whimsical works of authors like Edward Lear.
Despite all of my hesitancy and even ingrained prejudices I do accept that seeing an American White Pelican today was really quite special; standing head and shoulders above everything else and deservedly Bird of the Day.