Pelicans

The first analyses of blood samples taken from some of the hundreds of dead and disoriented pelicans discovered in recent weeks in highways and downtown areas from San Francisco to Baja California have failed to pinpoint the cause of the problem, biologists said Friday. Laboratory tests conducted by biologist David Caron at USC detected a potentially fatal algae toxin in some of the samples. However, whether those toxins "played a primary role, or perhaps some secondary role as an additional factor in the face of some other general phenomenon, is still very much open to debate," Caron said.

Federal officials told state fish and game officials that their plan to halve the number of nesting pelicans by 2013 to boost fisheries is an "eradication program" that needs more work. The Idaho Fish and Game Commission in May approved a five-year plan to kill and haze American white pelicans in southeastern Idaho to protect sport fish and Yellowstone cutthroat trout populations. The plan calls for shooting some pelicans and applying oil to eggs to suffocate the embryos. Pelicans are protected under federal law, so anything to cut their numbers requires U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service approval.

Hour after hour, prepared with clean towels and feeding tubes, they waited Tuesday for the next arrival of the pelicans. And when the van finally pulled into the driveway, the small band of volunteers with the Pacific Wildlife Project rushed outside to yank open the doors. Inside, they found a mass of brown and gray feathers, foot-long bills, wings, beady eyes, more wings.

A suspected outbreak of avian botulism has killed 2,000 pelicans, authorities said Friday. White pelicans and endangered brown pelicans began dying Thursday, said David Klinger of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service in Portland, Ore. "I would say we're very concerned. We're not alarmed at this point," he said. "No fears have been voiced that this will spread. "There is no risk to human health," Klinger said.

The death count of pelicans and other birds at the Salton Sea in the Imperial Valley is approaching 4,000, and officials say they cannot yet pinpoint the cause of the mass dieoff. "Right now we're just trying to clean the mess up," Patrick Moore, a spokesman for the California Department of Fish and Game, said Tuesday. The Department of Fish and Game and the U.S.

A virulent outbreak of botulism that has killed or sickened 2,500 to 2,800 pelicans at the Salton Sea--including about 1,000 endangered brown pelicans--has begun to spread to other species of birds. Although the die-off among pelicans is slowing, "it is getting worse in the shorebird population," Salton Sea National Wildlife Refuge manager Clark Bloom said Monday. "It is affecting everything down here at the sea. . . . I'm sure more birds will die before this is over with."

A new study of oil-doused brown pelicans cleaned and released after the infamous 1990 Huntington Beach oil spill paints a gloomy picture of their survival, showing that only a few lived more than one or two years after the incident. The study underscores the damage that oil spills inflict on feathered wildlife and also raises questions about the long-term success of efforts to clean birds and return them to the wild.

At first glance, it looks like a stable, this dimly lit, block-walled space with its concrete floors and long rows of barred doors. But behind each door sit brown pelicans, two or three to a stall, hundreds in all, with gleaming eyes, sculpted bills, curvaceous necks, feathers slick from their morning shower.

With a feathery grace that belied their narrow escape from death, 16 California brown pelicans stricken with botulism at the Salton Sea but nursed back to health in Laguna Niguel were released Thursday into the tranquil waters of the federal wildlife refuge here. "I feel like a father sending his daughter out on her first date," said Richard Evans, the Orange County veterinarian and medical director of the nonprofit Pacific Wildlife Project in Laguna Niguel.

With a feathery grace that belied their narrow escape from death, 16 California brown pelicans stricken with botulism but then nursed back to health in Laguna Niguel were released Thursday into the federal wildlife refuge here. "I feel like a father sending his daughter out on her first date," said Richard Evans, the Orange County veterinarian and medical director of the nonprofit Pacific Wildlife Project in Laguna Niguel. "We've done everything we could to teach them the right thing to do.