Pelicans of Marsh Lake

After nearly a century's absence, these magnificent birds are once again nesting in Minnesota.

By Dominique Braud

Their hands and clothes soiled with pelican guano, the graduate students and their leader, Al Grewe, professor of biological sciences at St. Cloud State University, were not in the mood for talk. Visibly tired, they hardly seemed to notice the spray that pelted their faces as their boat skipped over the choppy waters of Marsh Lake, bringing them back to shore.

Indeed, it had been a long day for everyone, and according to my watch, it was not yet noon. We had gathered at the public access on the north shore of Marsh Lake, a reservoir on the Minnesota River, at 4:30 a.m.--Grewe and 15 graduate students; Mark Spoden, Department of Natural Resources assistant area wildlife manager; and Dave Trauba, DNR refuge manager at Lac qui Parle Wildlife Management Area. The team's objective was to band birds, including as many white pelican chicks as possible, on an island at the southeastern end of the lake.

Part of the Lac qui Parle WMA, this island--only 300 yards long and nicknamed Big Island by the biologists harbors most of the pelicans at the Marsh Lake colony. The largest of three breeding colonies of pelicans in Minnesota, this colony in Big Stone County was discovered in 1968. A colony was found in Lake of the Woods County in 1973, and another was located on Minnesota Lake in Faribault County in 1994. Several records exist of other nesting sites in the state, but these sites were either abandoned after a few years or are simply too recent or unstable to be considered established colonies.

For Grewe, this banding expedition was the latest of many visits to the island. Since 1972 his teams of graduate students have returned to Marsh Lake every June to band and collect data on the pelicans.

White pelicans were common at the time of European settlement, but as the human population grew, so did disturbance around the breeding colonies. In 1878 unscrupulous picnickers destroyed the eggs of the last colony in Minnesota, and the birds abandoned the site.

People continued to see pelicans in the summer and along their migration routes, but no documented breeding population appeared in the state until 1968, when about 25 active nests were discovered on Hermit Island on Marsh Lake, about a mile northwest of Big Island. Finally, after 90 years, white pelicans had returned to Minnesota to breed.

Remarkable Number

Since this humble beginning, the Marsh Lake colony has experienced a dramatic and steady increase. In the 1980s white pelicans left Hermit Island to cormorants and gulls and moved to Big Island. To accommodate its growth, the colony has expanded beyond the boundaries of Big Island and now includes portions of the mainland on the northeastern shore of Marsh Lake. In June 1996 Grewe estimated the colony's population at 10,000 birds, including 4,000 chicks, a remarkable number considering that in 1972, when the banding project started, the researchers found only 10 chicks to band.

In 25 years, more than 27,000 white pelicans have been fitted with U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service bands, mostly at the hands of Grewe and his graduate students. Bands of wintering birds have been recovered from states along the Gulf of Mexico, especially Texas, and as far south as Mexico and Guatemala. The bands enable researchers to gather a tremendous amount of information on this species' migration and mortality. Though sometimes hard to determine, causes of death have been attributed to three major factors: getting shot during the hunting season, flying into power lines and other human-made structures, and becoming entangled in monofilament fishing line.

Rafts of Pelicans

Around 5:30 a.m., as the boat approached Big Island, the drone of the outboard motor flushed flocks of herons and egrets from their nests. They watched us warily from treetops on nearby shores. Rafts of hundreds of pelicans also flushed from their nests and reassembled a stone's throw from the island. Bobbing in the waves, their feathers dyed deep orange by the rising sun, they too kept a wary eye on us.

The morning was clear and crisp, with a steady northwest breeze. The forecast was for sun, with highs in the 70s--ideal conditions for the banders and young birds alike. Intense heat, cold temperatures, or drenching rain could kill babies temporarily deserted by their parents while the banders worked.

I can't quite remember what struck me first when we landed at the northern tip of the island: the stench of dead fish and bird feces, or the incredible variety of bird life on this diminutive piece of real estate. Thousands of birds circled in wide loops over us, loudly protesting our intrusion. The alarm calls of pelicans, ring-billed gulls, great and cattle egrets, cormorants, and, in lesser numbers, great blue and black-crowned night herons resounded in a dizzying cacophony.

The researchers fanned out with military precision, moving quickly to round up the down-covered juveniles. Though unable to fly for another month or so, these 3- to 5-week-old chicks could definitely run and swim, so the banders had their hands full keeping them from escaping the human corrals and dashing into the lake. When caught, a frightened chick has one trick left--a bird bander's favorite: It regurgitates the smelly contents of its stomach onto its attacker. Despite the difficulties, the crew managed to band 2,000 pelican chicks that morning.

Constant Vigilance

Walking around the colony, I could see why this refuge is closed during the nesting season: We had to maintain constant vigilance to avoid stepping on eggs or young. Scattered all over the bare ground were thousands of pelican and cormorant nests in various stages of development. Some pelican nests had downy young; others still held the normal clutch of two chalky white eggs.

Pelican nests are shallow depressions in the ground, lined with whatever material is available nearby. Pebbles and sticks scraped from the area around the nest are commonly used. Feathers, vegetation--most of it stolen from cormorant nests--and the occasional bones from dead comrades are used too.

Breeding pelicans lack a brood patch, an area of bare skin on the belly used by most birds to incubate their eggs. They incubate their eggs by holding one in each webbed foot. They nest incredibly close to each other, as if each pelican had built its nest just far enough from its neighbor to avoid getting pecked. Essentially gregarious, pelicans become territorial during the nesting season, fiercely defending the nest against intruders and often killing wandering babies from nearby nests.

As I was photographing the colony, I came across a nest with a single chick, hatched minutes earlier. The naked baby still had pieces of eggshell glued to its body. It was, I thought, the ugliest baby I had ever seen. It certainly showed little resemblance to the majestic adults soaring overhead with incomparable grace on 7-foot wingspans.

Eggs hatch after an incubation of about 30 days. Chicks eat partially digested food, obtained by shoving their heads into a parent's pouch. On this protein-rich diet of fish, salamanders, crayfish, and tadpoles, dispensed about five times a day for the first two weeks, the young grow rapidly.

After three or four weeks, chicks eat more sporadically as they begin roaming the island with groups of juvenile birds their own age. These pods of younger birds remain close to their nests, returning to be fed by their parents and to spend the night. Even amid the confusion of hundreds of young pelicans in a pod, parents and juveniles seem to recognize each other, and an adult typically regurgitates food only to its own soliciting young. By their eighth or ninth week, the young attempt their first flights. Over the summer, they perfect their flying and fishing skills before following the adults on their fall migration. By mid-October, most birds have left Marsh Lake.

Courtship Flights

Pelicans return to the Marsh Lake colony in mid-April and immediately begin their breeding activity. On courtship flights, one female and several bachelor males fly in large circles, riding the thermals over the island during the hot hours of the day. Following pairing, pelicans select nests and mate. By late April or early May most females have laid eggs, but egg-laying can extend into early June.

The older, experienced nesters favor the center of the island, an area of flat, compacted soil devoid of vegetation, where visibility is excellent in all directions and potential predators have no place to hide. While vegetation might be present early in the nesting phase, it is quickly trampled by courting birds and killed by their feces. Younger, less experienced nesters usually arrive later and must spread outward to the periphery of the colony, where willows, cattails, and dense stands of nettles and marsh-elder have more successfully resisted the constant trampling of thousands of adults.

No State Cost

While never the object of any special state or federal program, the Marsh Lake colony has benefited from being part of the Lac qui Parle WMA, created in 1957. The WMA kept the breeding site off limits to visitors, and Mother Nature did the rest.

"For some species like the bald eagle, the peregrine falcon, or the trumpeter swan, establishing successful breeding programs in Minnesota has been expensive," says Carrol Henderson, DNR Nongame Wildlife Program supervisor. "With minimum protection and an adequate food supply, pelicans have been able to re-establish themselves at no cost to the state."

Not everyone views the prosperity of the Marsh Lake colony with the same favor. Anglers sometimes accuse pelicans of depleting lakes of game fish. However, according to Henderson, game fish make up only a small percentage of the pelican diet.

White pelicans, unlike brown pelicans, don't dive from the air to catch fish, and thus are not likely to catch deep-water fish.

White pelicans prefer to fish in a line, side by side, herding their prey toward shallow water where they surround it and scoop it up in their pouches. The bulk of their diet consists of rough fish, such as carp, bullheads, and suckers, as well as sunfish and a surprising number of salamanders and crayfish. During my visit to Big Island, I found numerous regurgitated carp near the nests, some more than a foot long. Despite misunderstanding about pelicans' fishing habits, people tolerate pelicans better than they do cormorants, which also feed primarily on rough fish.

The future of the Marsh Lake colony appears bright. Chick mortality due to gulls and other predators, sibling harassment, and cannibalism prevalent in other pelican colonies, such as Chase Lake in North Dakota, has had little impact here, perhaps because Marsh Lake, Lac qui Parle, and nearby Big Stone National Wildlife Refuge have abundant food. As the population expands, only an avian disease seems likely to threaten the colony. In 1992 an epidemic of Newcastle disease nearly wiped out the entire population of chicks. Yet one has to trust that, given half a chance, nature will take care of its own, just as it did in bringing pelicans back to Minnesota.

Dominique Braud is a free-lance photographer from Farmington. He visited Big Island with Professor Al Grewe's bird-banding expedition in 1996.