The Changing Faces of the California Brown Pelican

Mt wife and I stopped along the edge of Bodega Bay, on the California Coast, this past weekend, to enjoy some clam chowder and watch some seabirds.  As we sat and ate, a number of California Brown Pelicans were standing or sleeping on a floating dock nearby.  The different colors and patterns on the heads of these birds can reveal a lot about their age and breeding condition.  About half of the birds we were watching had the solid brown head and neck, even brown body, and white belly of hatch year birds.  Since the Brown Pelican breeding season is generally from March to July, these are birds that just hatched within the last few months.  Other birds had white feathers on their faces withe some brown speckling, and brown feathers down their necks.  These were the adult birds in their non-breeding plumage.  They hatched in the summer of 2011 or earlier.  The two birds were could see the clearest probably were in fact 2011 birds because their tails had feathers that were grayer adult feathers, but also stall had some brown feathers mixed in that matched the tail feathers of the hatch year birds.  These retained feathers had not been replaced during the first cycles of molt (large birds often have several “generations” of feathers at one time.  This is thought to be because of how much energy and resources it takes to grown so many large feathers.).  As the year progresses, the face of these adult Brown Pelicans will change just prior to the beginning of the breeding season to be a pale yellow color on the head and still have the dark brown neck.  After the breeding season their appearance will change again to the familiar pale yellow head and white neck.  The next plumage in the cycle is the brown neck with the white head and speckles that we saw in Bodega Bay.  We along the central and northern California coast do not see the plumage just before the breeding season very often because Brown Pelicans along the Pacific coast have a strange migratory pattern.  Where most migratory birds go south in the winter to rest and north in the summer to breed, California Brown Pelicans go north in the winter to rest and fish along the California coast and go south in the summer to breed in the Gulf of Mexico.

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