One location was Raccoon Island, where Carloss, then a teenage field assistant at the Louisiana Department of Wildlife and Fisheries, remembers tossing fish from the beach to feed chicks, as a sort of surrogate parent. More than 1,200 were released in southeastern Louisiana over 13 years. DDT ban in 1972, biologists brought pelican chicks from Florida to repopulate empty islands across the Gulf of Mexico. But a long-running effort to bring them back led to one of the country’s most inspiring comeback stories.Īfter the U.S. The beloved pelicans were completely gone from Louisiana, where their likeness remained only on the state flag. Like bald eagles, their populations had been decimated by widespread DDT pesticide use, which thinned eggshells and prevented healthy chicks from hatching. The large coastal birds were among the first species declared endangered in the U.S. When Mike Carloss was a child in Louisiana in the 1960s, he never saw brown pelicans. Without seabirds, the land would disappear much faster. After all, the copious bird droppings act as natural fertilizer that helps shrubs and grass grow from the island’s sand and stones. Then suddenly the biologists are wiping white dribbles from their foreheads again. Watching a seabird colony reveals at once the promise and fragility of new life. When parents are off the nest, the older chicks stand guard, swaying and hissing at perceived threats. Within a week, chicks are covered in downy white and gray feathers. She figures they hatched overnight or earlier that day.
Passing one ground nest, Slaton bends to watch as two tiny featherless gray and pink pelican chicks squirm, eyes still closed. “The late nesters are on the ground, which is riskier.”Ĭamera data has shown that in recent years the main threat is flooding - which can wash away entire nests, as happened in April 2021. The early birds snatch up mangrove penthouses, where nests have a better chance of surviving storms, Slaton explains. Some of the circular nests of smooth cordgrass are built atop mangrove stands, others on grassy hillocks. The motion-activated cameras are set up to observe pelican nests in varied habitats. The calls of a thousand laughing gulls are loud enough to drown out human thought.Īs Slaton treks sand dunes to change out batteries and memory cards for 10 trail cameras on poles, her T-shirt becomes speckled in white bird droppings. The swirling, swooping cacophony of feathered life announces the intruders. Visiting a seabird colony is like entering the hustle and bustle of a busy city, with neighborhoods of birds loosely grouped by species - pelicans, terns, egrets, spoonbills and gulls, all ferrying meals to chicks.Īs Slaton and two other biologists walk along Raccoon Island’s shoreline, the birds alight.
It’s all happening here,” said University of Louisiana at Lafayette ecologist Jimmy Nelson. “We’re on the front lines of climate change. Scientists estimate Louisiana loses one football field worth of ground every 60 to 90 minutes. The same forces swallowing up these coastal islands are also causing southern Louisiana’s saltwater marshes to disappear faster than anywhere else in the country. But soaring low over the ocean, their wingtips skimming the water, pelicans are streamlined and majestic. On land, brown pelicans are clumsy-looking birds, their huge beaks and wings lending them what Slaton calls a “goofy” air. The vanishing islands threaten one of the last century’s most celebrated conservation success stories - the decades-long effort to bring the pelicans back from the edge of extinction. “Subsidence and sea level rise are a double whammy.” “Louisiana is rapidly losing land,” said Slaton, a researcher at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette. But today, only about six islands in southeastern Louisiana harbor brown pelican nests - the rest have disappeared underwater.
A dozen years ago, there were around 15 low-lying islands with nesting colonies of Louisiana’s state bird.