Smologies #41: PELICANS with Juita Martinez

Oh hey, it's that lady in the park just staring at pigeons, trying to imagine what's on their minds. Ali word back with more ologies to gulp into your mouth, pouch, oh open wide for Thismology's episode about pelicans. Here's the deal. If you're like, what's smologies? Asmologies are shorter, edited versions. They're g rated, so they're classroom safe. This one is all about birds with big mouths now. If you want the full episode, you can click the link in the

I mean on the inside, like very deep.

Maybe you would know that you're going to know this better than I would. Are you a pelicanologist? Have you ever used that word?

I actually have never used that word.

But starting from today, I'm actually going to change my Twitter bio.

I checked, and she changed her Twitter bio to read PhD student hashtag dinosaur f loofs equals brown pelicans plus pelicanology And now what about brown pelicans? First off, what is a pelican? Is a pelican only the kind of have the purse attached to their face.

I've never actually heard someone say that. That is awesome. I love that description of it.

So a handbag for a mouth.

That is a good one. I love it.

Yes, So all pelicans have a purse which is better known as a google arm pouch, and that's what helps them survive.

That is how they catch their food. Gool art means throat in Latin. So what google arc pouch is pelican face person, That's what it is.

Brown pelicans specifically actually plunge dive, so from about thirty feet or so up in the air, they will spot school of fish and then just dive down and use that pouch to basically scoop up all the fish. It's in my purse.

And what do they do with all the water that they also scoop up?

So if there's other birds around, such as gulls that try to like steal the fish from their mouths, they will just slightly open their builds and let the water like seep out until there's just fish in their pouch.

Why do they need so many fish? This is what I can't understand because they're kind of big birds, right, But other big birds they catch a fish, they catch a thing at a time. But pelicans are like in it. I feel like they have the best equipment in the game, Like why do they need to catch so much fish?

I would think it depends on the season.

So if they're trying to feed their chicks, they have about a maximum of three chicks. So if you think about a pelican, they're about sixteen pounds, which is quite a bit of weight. And on top of that, they have to feed themselves have enough energy to fly around and catch the fish. But then they also have one to three mouths to feed. They're gonna need quite a

And then what about their wingspan? Because the sixteen pound bird's pretty big. How big are the wings to keep it aloft?

It's about six feet, which is taller than me.

Oh that's huge. Yeah, that's like a condor size, right.

Yeah, it's a good social distancing size.

Oh my god.

That needs to be your new campaign. Is everyone's stay one pelican wingspan away from each omd oh my god. So sixteen pounds six feet? Because are they all inland? I mean, are they all golf or or coastal or are they inland too?

So we have two species.

In North America, we have the brown pelican and the white pelican, And actually the brown pelican is smaller than the white pelican by about ten pounds or so.

And the brown.

Pelican stays on a coastline like up and down the West coast and then throughout the Gulf of Mexico and up to North Carolina ish And the white pelicans, on the other hand, you can't see them on the coast, but they breed inland.

How many pelican species are there in the world. I looked it up. There are eight, in case that ever comes up in a game of Pelican trivia. And now you call them flute dinosaurs, dinosaur.

Flufes, dinosaur blops.

Are they really fuzzy?

Okay? So there's like this middle stage.

They're born naked and then they start getting these little hint feathers and they get their down feathers first. And that down feather is what sparked the hashtag. So down feather is the insulating part of their body and it's really soft and fluey, and so when you're holding a kind of baby pelican that just has down feathers, they're pretty fluefy, and I feel very lucky.

So you've gotten to hold them.

Yes, So we have a project because Louisiana is losing land at a very rapid rate because it's sinking and the sea level is rising. So these islands that are perfect habitats for these Pelicans to raise their youngs are actually getting overtopped and just completely disappearing. We don't really understand what happens to pelicans once their islands disappear, because their instinct is to come back to the same islands

So apparently only thirty percent of Pelicans survive their first year of life. Only two percent make it to age ten, but some some have been known to live until their forties, so some are out there. There's a gen X Pelican listening to britpop. But how do they tell who's who?

So my lab does orange bands, and other labs that study pelicans use different color bands, and these color bands are really large, so we can see them from really far away without having to disturb the birds.

Oh that's nice. When I was looking at baby pelicans on your Twitter, I myself had an impulse to want to give them one tiny kiss on their heads. Is that a normal impulse for a person?

I would say yes.

But if you ever come down to Louisiana and come out to the islands with me, I think you will be satisfied just by holding them, because I will say, they might be flufy, but they're all so very stinky. So a hug A hug is as far as I usually want to go with it.

That's good.

I know that it is like, not a good idea to put my mouth on wildlife. For the wildlife's sake. Do not put your mouth on wildlife. The wildlife does not want you to. Also, I looked at the fluffs, and they look like what would come out of the dryer, like in the lint hatch after washing a load of brand new flufy towels. So picture lintball, but with big, clappy, flappy face parts. But when they're born, they are indeed featherless. They look like little alive frozen chickens. So cute, so cute.

And the gular pouch or the purse is so tiny on the babych.

Fix and they're just oh my gosh. It gets me every time.

When you're talking about doing restoration work to make sure that they have a home that they can come back to, or that they have habitat that they can inhabit. How do you do that if you're up against things like sea levels rising and like land sinking. What do you do?

So right now Louisiana's being restored, but not by me. They actually have agencies such as the Coastal Protection and Restoration Act, and different groups of people that come out here and basically perform something called dredging. So they put in these pipes basically under the ocean level, and what they do is they pump a bunch of sediments from the ocean floor onto these islands.

WHOA, So we're basically just.

Building land from the ocean floor, just putting it up.

And these pipes go for miles.

When you are tracking them, I mean, can you see on a year to year basis any any change or improvement?

Yes, So some islands have been restored and some have not. And what my research aims to do is to compare the pelican populations on these two different sets of islands across coastal Louisiana, and our preliminary data is telling us that there is a larger population on restored island, which means the restoration is working and the billions.

Of dollars is not being wasted.

Yeah, and we also found that chicks are more likely to reach that age where they can fly away and fend for themselves on restored islands versus those that are born on unrestored islands, which is really helpful because no one's actually looked at that yet.

How are their numbers like when? When did they start to maybe take a dip?

So by nineteen sixty three, brown pelicans were completely extinct from the state of Louisiana.

Yes, due to DDT.

So if they if they keep laying eggs and the eggs keep getting crushed, or if the nest keeps failing, they'll actually leave the area.

That's it. I'm out of here, oh man.

And a brown pelican is the state bird.

So for the state to not have brown pelicans did it really make sense?

Yeah?

That's so there was this huge push to re establish the population here and the way that they did it was they actually brought a little over one thousand brown pelican.

Chicks from Florida. So for the most part, all of.

The pelicans in Louisiana right now are descendants of the one thousand or so Florida population.

That is nuts. So they were Louisiana's like, we either have to change the stay bird or we have to get more pelicans in here immediately.

People yes, and they did the ladder, which I'm glad to say that it was a huge success and it took a lot of effort and I'm so happy that everyone involved like did their part.

And right now we're just trying.

To maintain their population and make sure it doesn't like decrease anymore. And they're doing pretty good right now. Their numbers could be a little bit better. It also depends on the fishery, So if there's less fish, less chicks are likely to survive and therefore their population isn't going to grow as well.

Okay, so what happens if you take a Florida pelican and you move it to Louisiana. What if they don't like Louisiana's fish menu. Well, Jueta is collabbing with the Nelson Lab at the University of Louisiana to figure out their favorite fish, and it turns out their diet is ninety eight percent men Hayden, which is a silvery forked

I don't. I don't know if tucked is the word. I would it's not.

Necessarily like swaying, like I'm picturing it like like a windbreaker.

I don't know why, Like I'm trying to picture like what it feels like. Is it like leather or denim or skin? These are questions that one can ask a pelicanologist. What do their bills or the pouch, like what is it? Do you have you ever touched it, Like, what does it feel like?

It basically feels like saggy skin, like extremely saggy and rigges.

And it's really flexible.

That seems so cute. In case you ever need to brag about a pelican, just know that they can dive bombfish at forty miles an hour and their beaks, which have been unchanged for like thirty million years, slice the water to handle that speed and that velocity, and that pouch I read acts like a little parachute underwater to help slow them down. So essentially they're fighter jets, but cooler and smellier. And what are their nests like?

So their nests they prefer to nest on taller shrubs because Louisiana floods quite often, so if they're on like taller vegetation, the chances of in nest flooding is smaller, and they tend to use sticks. So they're maybe like two and a half feet in diameter, pretty large nests, maybe a little smaller now I'm trying to think I've never actually measured of pelican nests, but they're pretty big. We're currently using drones to see we can get accurate nest counts.

And you can definitely see the nests from a drone.

Oh wow, do you have time? Do you mind getting asked patron questions?

Oh? Mash yeah, bring Maddie. I'm so excited.

Okay, so before we get to your questions, a few words about sponsors who make it possible for ologies to donate to a cause of the ologist choosing each week, and this week, Jimina and all the folks at Black af and Stem decided on Backyard Basecamp dot org, which is inspiring black, Indigenous and all people of color across Baltimore City to find nature where they are and empowering

Oh my gosh, I totally saw that.

So it's only like part of their it's like basically their neck vertebrae. So when they're doing that, they're actually just yawning, yeah, yawning slash stretching. So while I'm taking my camera chat photosm that actually.

Happens all the time. Really, I recorded in my data sheet as yawning.

Oh my god, what other what other things are in your data sheet like like yawning, like eye rolling, farting, Like what do you have to do to shot down?

I basically write down any and all behavior that I see, so everything from feeding. You can actually tell when a pelican chick is being fed because they're going to feed straight out of the pouch. So the baby chick's head is in the parents' big pouch basically picking out fish.

And one more thing on that vertebrae coming out of the neck. It's actually just their neck showing through the bottom of their pouch when they yawner when they sit weird, but essentially, No, their spine isn't coming out of their neck. It's just kind of like pushing through the bottom of their pouch normal.

Something else I record is if there is any neighborly conducts happening, so they'll sometimes bicker with one another.

David's stop acting like a disgruntled pelican.

They're pretty territorial over their one little nest spot.

Okay, I looked up video of this. Sometimes these little dinosaur flufs use their long bills to bite each other's bills, and it sounds like clacking a bunch of rulers together, but it looks like when my sisters and I would fight over baretts. Diane Pete wants to know do pelicans chew their food or do they just swallow it? And what's the largest prey a pelican can eat or is it mostly about like eating a bunch of jelly beans at once instead of eating like a whole cowzone.

So they just do one big, big gulp. I'm sure if there's multiple fish in their pouch, though, they'll probably do a few big gulf. They don't chew on anything, so it's whole fish that they are swallowing and regurgitating for their young to eat.

Do they regurgitate it? Is it like a slurry?

No, it's actually a whole fish.

Oh yeah, dang, Okay, I thought it. I was for sure. I thought that was gonna be like a fish smoothie. But it's just like bloop, just like taking a granola bar right out of your own stomach.

Yeah, basically.

This next one was asked by my pal Greg Wallach and Megan Walker, William Andrews, and Laura Merriman, who referenced the nineteen ten limerick by Dixon Linear Merit, an ornithology enthusiast and a professional humorist. The limericks, so goes a wonderful bird is the pelican. His bill will hold more than his pelican. He can take in his beak enough food for a week. So bill versus gastric capacity. Can a pelican's beak hold more than its pelican belly can?

Yes, we used to tell that to our fifth and sixth graders when I was a naturalist back in the day. So it's beak can actually hold more than is belly can if you're counting the water volume.

Oh yeat, and then it just squirts it out and then it keeps the fish.

Yes, thanks a good que remember it.

Thomas N. Wyndham wants to know if Pelican chicks toss their siblings out of the nest.

Not usually, I have never seen them in my cameras, but there is sibling rivalry in the sense that if there is not enough food to go around, the youngest chick tends to not get fed.

Oh okay, yeah, so the order and.

That they were born is the order in which the parents will generally feed them.

They can remember, But are are they like ten hours apart, like like how soon they hatch? Kind of It's more like a day or so, okay. And it's not that the parents remember. It's more that the older chicks are louder.

They're more willing to like shove their siblings out of the way, like get to the parents first.

Oh okay, Megan Walker. How tough are their insides? And do the fish die right away? It seems like a fresh floppy fish would do some damage to the insides.

So, I mean, just like our stomachs, their stomachs have pretty high acid content.

I'm not sure how fast the fish actually.

Is like stop moving inside there, but I would assume it's pretty fast.

Yeah.

I look this up and apparently it's pretty acidic in there, and fish are not long for this world. Once in a bird belly. Ronan last question says, the brown pelican is my mom's favorite bird, which is amazing, And I asked her if she has a question, And so Ronan's mom wants to know. So do pelicans migrate or do they live in the same temperate location year round?

So in Louisiana, we do have brown pelicans that hang around all year, but some of them actually do travel down to Central America.

Ooh, and that's wintertime.

Yes, so outside of February through like August, they can be somewhere else.

I love the idea that they're just like little snowbirds, just having some fun. Some of they're on vacation, they just have a time share.

I'm also jealous they get to leave, but I'm stuck in cold Louisiana.

And you're just like waiting for them to come to back.

Yes, that's literally my life. Like, actually, what about.

Your favorite thing about pelicans or your work?

The fact that I get to be so close to these birds is wild because very few people get that opportunity and being surrounded by ten thousand nesting birds, specifically pelicans.

It's a wild experience, and pelicans are actually not that bad.

It's all the other birds around them, from the turn to the skimmers to the lapping goals.

They're super loud. But that's why I love.

Taking volunteers out there when a pandemic isn't currently going on, because I get to see my field site in a whole new light and remember, oh yeah, most people don't get to see that happening, and it's like the coolest thing. I just went out into the field for the first time yesterday and I took one of my committee members and another grad student, both of whom have not been on the islands. And I know they're team fish, but I'm just gonna say they were smiling from their ears, so.

From one side of their pouch to the other. Yes, Oh that's so exciting. Well, you have given me a new appreciation of pelicans and pelican babies and their floppy skin pouches and their face purses.

I'm gonna call them face persa. So now I love that.

Just digging around, just digging around that handbag. Oh look at this another fish. You never know I'm so glad I got a chance to talk to you. If I'm next time I come to Louisiana, I'm gonna look you up. I hope it's in field season.

Oh my god, yes, we.

Have to have that would be awesome. So ask smart pelicanologists flappy saggy, sappy, silly questions because they love pelicans. And now, so do you look at that you love pelicans? And Juta you can follow her on Instagram or on Twitter at Juita Martinez. I will a link to those handles and to her website in the show notes. We are at ologies on Twitter and Instagram. I'm Ali word with one L on both. Also linked is aliward dot com slash Asmologies, which has dozens more kids Safe and

Sologis knowlogies, ugies, knowledgies.

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