In a message dated 11/6/2002 2:01:43 PM Mountain Standard Time, NJ-MEMORIES-D-request@rootsweb.com writes: > I don't know if he made it or not, but I'm told that if they > stay in the water too long they will drown. > I have no idea whether or not that's true, but I have heard that brown pelicans will stuff themselves if given the chance. A book we have here at home tells an anecdote of a couple of fishermen in Florida who decided to give a pelican all the fish it could eat, just to see how much the critter really would consume if given the chance. That bird ate every fish that the two of them (I think it was two; it might even have been more) could catch, and finally it was so loaded that it couldn't even swallow the last one. There it sat, with half the fish hanging out of its huge beak. Every so often the bird would jump up and down a few times as if to resettle the contents of its stomach, and a bit more of the fish in its bill would disappear. Finally, after some time, the last of the fish went down the hatch. And almost immediately the pelican was begging for more fish. And that brings to mind the old limerick about pelicans: "A wonderful bird is the pelican: Its bill can hold more than its belican. It can take in its beak Enough food for a week. I'll be darned if I know how the helican." We used to see brown pelicans at the beach in California. Generally we'd see them flying in a line, either gliding all together or flapping almost in unison. The first bird would begin slowly flapping its wings, then the second one would start, then the third, and so on down the line until they were all doing it. Their profiles all looked like some weird prehistoric creatures Here in Colorado we don't have brown pelicans, but several of our lakes have the big white ones, which are considerably larger than the brown. They don't fly much; they do their hunting by ganging up on a bunch of fish and herding them into shallow water, where the birds can take turns shoveling up dinner with those huge, ridiculous-looking bills. Doris (Up2Nutrix@aol.com) "He is no fool who gives what he cannot keep to gain what he cannot lose." -- Jim Elliot, missionary and martyr