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Pelican Grace
JUNE 2006
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Survivors
Photograph by Klaus Nigge
American white pelican adults guard chicks piled into a "creche" to share warmth on a rainy night at Montana's Medicine Lake National Wildlife Refuge. About 4,000 breeding pairs (of a species population of around 50,000 pairs) arrive here each April after wintering mainly along the Gulf of Mexico. These powerful if seemingly awkward fliers, with an adult wingspan of about nine feet (three meters), survived shooting and pesticides in the last century only to confront West Nile virus today. In 2003, the year of the first confirmed deaths from the virus at Medicine Lake, it claimed about a thousand chicks. But fewer have died in recent years, and the population appears to be stable—so far.
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