There’s a WHAT on the lawn?
An unexpected visitor used the grass outside of Sproul Hall as a landing field one day in early April. Safely on the ground, the flyer, a full-grown pelican of indeterminate age, ignored the humans streaming by, who were heading off to home and dinner. The main rush was over, and most didn’t notice the grey ball of feathers, hunkered down and unmoving, as they hurried along.
Smartphones and Google made the hunt for organizational alternatives somewhat easier, but it was after five, and most of those were closed, offered only polite recordings, or had no quick solution. The longer the bird stayed put, the more vulnerable it seemed and the bleaker its chances.
Then good fortune arrived on foot in the person of a young woman named Mara Guccione — in transit to her evening UC Extension class in Barrows Hall when she saw the pelican and its befuddled human attendants. Guccione, it turns out, is totally versed in What To Do in such situations. She’s a trained wildlife responder for International Bird Rescue — whose local center the police had just reached on the phone. Presto, their representative was already on the scene.
Guccione called her husband, Odin Zackman, who drove their truck through rush-hour traffic from their home in southwest Berkeley, bringing a dog crate and a patterned sheet.
Equipped, responder-Mara walked up behind the pelican, draped the cloth over it, and gathered it into her arms. The bird remained calm and did not protest, despite the compelling traditions of the local geography.
Minutes later, the pelican and its rescuers literally drove off into the sunset.
At some point, they made a turn to the northeast, conveying the bird 30-some miles away to an avian halfway house in Cordelia (not far from Fairfield, if you’re familiar with the road to UC Davis and Sacramento).
The International Bird Rescue clinic offers medical care and safety for as long as it takes for each bird to get well and able to survive on his or her own. The pelican from Berkeley turns out to be a she (based in part on her size and bill length).
The experts have little more clue why she turned up on campus than the rest of us. Badly needed a rest stop, is the prevalent theory. One wag in UC’s Public Affairs office (where most are wags) suggested her GPS was on the fritz and couldn’t quite get her to her bronze likeness up the block.
For now, she’s in the best of hands. Her recovery pace will determine how long she stays at the clinic. She arrived thin and weak, but with no other apparent medical problems. According to Guccione, she made a great start: “She gained 700 grams overnight, which is a great sign.” It should be; 700 grams is about a pound and a half, a sizable chunk for an animal whose normal fighting weight would normally at most be about the same as a small dog (a pug, say, or a Lhasa Apso).
As a species, the brown pelican has bounced back from impending oblivion. First decimated so its feathers could decorate hats, it was nearly done in by the cumulative food-chain buildup of the insecticide DDT, which was banned in the United States in 1972. The brown pelican was listed as endangered in 1970, three years before Congress passed the Endangered Species Act. Almost four decades later, in late 2009, after the DDT ban and vigorous conservation efforts and environmental protection, the species was officially delisted. Interior Secretary Ken Salazar said at the time, “Today we can say the brown pelican is back,” with an estimated global population of about 650,000.