Subject: RBA: Pelican Sp., New Westminster BC
Date: Oct 24 19:08 PD 1996
From: Michael Price - mprice at mindlink.bc.ca


Hi Tweets,

Finally get a chance to write this up.

Coming back from lunch** (see below) late this afternoon, noticed that there
were a number of large, high gull kettles over the Fraser with an adult Bald
Eagle in one of them. I pointed it out to Mike Beck, my office supervisor,
and mentioned that it may be one of the first of the Bald Eagles coming out
to the coast from the northern Interior, where it's beginning to freeze up a
little. Much higher, there was another *big* bird soaring up very high with
the gulls that didn't look right for a large hawk, osprey, vulture, or
eagle, showing a very strange wing-profile and soaring in very wide circles,
that after a while showed the weirdest wingbeat. I watched to see if showed
the odd upward flick of a crane, because I know migrant cranes will loaf
along in pure or mixed kettles. It seemed similar, but with a bowed,
floppily-flexing wing rather than the flat wing of the crane. I thought of
the remote possibility of a southbound Great Blue Heron (having such a large
local resident population here, we take Great Blues as for granted as
wallpaper, and never think of it as a migrant through the area, but I'm sure
it must be), as it had some of that profile and they also will occasionally
go into sustained soar, either alone or sometimes in large kettles. When it
planed down to pick up the next thermal along, it turned out to be a
*pelican*, of all things, but still too high in the cruddy grey light to see
more than a silhouette, so which species is impossible to say.

Either Amer. White Pelican (AWPE) or Brown Pelican (BRPE) is a scarce
vagrant for the Greater Vancouver Checklist Area, and this is the late part
of the window for both southbound vagrancy for AWPE, or post-breeding
dispersed BRPE from the California colonies.

AWPE records show a regular window of appearance in late May-early June as
non-breeders from the Cariboo breeding colony at Stum Lk., and perhaps other
breeding locations or a generalised floating population of nonbreeding
subadults in the central interiors of BC and Washington State, come out to
the coast. There also seems to be a similar window of southbound vagrancy
of, I'd
guess, juveniles in September and October.

BRPE have started to show up regularly as post-breeding birds in the last
ten years, usually late Sept. into mid-October.

BTW, I would have stayed out on the street for the rest of the afternoon
trying to get some more detail on this bird, but I got a hardhearted "No
dice. You got miles to go before *you* sleep tonight, pal." from Mike. Yes,
wicked master.


**
If you ever find yourself in New Westminster, and you like East Indian
cuisine, ya *gotta* check out the Royal Tandoori on Columbia Street just E
of 6th Street. It recently replaced a favorite cheap but good Soup 'n
Sandwich joint (the 'Earl of Sandwich', heh), a MIND LINK! staff lunchtime
hangout that closed abruptly after fifteen years. Mike and I went in there
the other day on the testimonial of one of our Tech Support staff. Imagine
opening the door to a little greasy spoon where you expect to hear the
latest Top 40 thug-idol's Techno-Werke thudding out of the boombox on the
counter and instead up cranks the London Symphony Orchestra with a Haydn
concerto. That's what the food's like there. Cheap too. Nearly everyone of
our Tech and Office staff eat there every day now, and there's at least one
reference to heaven per person per meal. As in died and gone to.

Michael Price
Vancouver BC Canada
mprice at mindlink.net