Brown pelican rebounds

• By AMY WOLD
• Advocate staff writer
• Published: Nov 12, 2009 - Page: 1A

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LACOMBE — Louisiana’s state bird — the brown pelican — is officially no longer endangered, federal officials announced Wednesday.

“After over a century of effort, we are able to declare the brown pelican fully recovered,” said Tom Strickland, an assistant secretary of the U.S. Department of the Interior.

The brown pelican’s history has included several declines in population starting in the late 19th century, when the bird was hunted for its feathers, Strickland said at a news conference.

The decline prompted then-President Theodore Roosevelt to declare Pelican Island in Florida the first National Wildlife Refuge in part to protect the many brown pelicans that called the area home, Strickland said.

The brown pelican populations in Alabama, Georgia, Florida and along the Atlantic coast were removed from the Endangered Species List in 1985. Wednesday’s announcement removed the rest of the bird’s population from the list.

The brown pelican went through a recovery period until after World War II, when the use of pesticides such as DDT caused pelicans’ eggs to be easily breakable, with thin shells. The use of DDT was banned after Rachel Carson’s book “Silent Spring” publicized problems the pesticide was causing in bird populations, said Sam Hamilton, director of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, at Wednesday’s news conference.

The brown pelican stopped nesting in Louisiana in 1961, and the birds weren’t spotted at all in Louisiana in 1963, said Tom Hess, biologist manager with the Louisiana Department of Wildlife and Fisheries Rockefeller Refuge, in a 2008 interview.

Louisiana undertook a reintroduction program from 1968 to 1980 and brought in 1,276 pelicans from Florida. Today there are numerous nesting colonies along coastal Louisiana.

“You don’t get to the point of taking a species off the list without a lot of hard work,” Hamilton said.

Since the brown pelican is found in areas across the coastal United States, the announcement could have been made anywhere, but the officials chose Louisiana because of the brown pelican’s status as Louisiana’s state bird, Hamilton said.

Sen. Mary Landrieu, D-La., said at the announcement that, in celebrating the return and delisting of the brown pelican, it’s important to recognize that the coastal landscape the bird uses in Louisiana is disappearing.

The work of the President Barack Obama’s Gulf Coast Interagency Working Group will bring together the federal agencies to make sure coastal restoration and conservation work can move forward more efficiently, Strickland said.

“We’re going to try to escalate the emphasis this is given at the federal level,” he said.