Brown Pelican in MA, June 2012

A post came across the MA listserve at about 1 PM that a Brown Pelican had been seen swimming in a secluded harbor in northwest Gloucester at about 11:45 though the observer was not seeing it now.  Perhaps this bird was blown off-course by a tropical storm that had been in the south the week before.  Although I saw the post just a couple minutes after it came across, the sighting was now nearly an hour and a half old, and I was about an hour’s drive away.  But a bird in a quiet harbor area could well stick around for a while, so I decided to give it a try. 

En route to Gloucester I gave my birding buddies Denny Abbott and David Deifik calls to alert them of this bird.  I arrived at about 2:30 but saw no pelican, and surprisingly no birders either.  Over the next hour I was able to get to several different vantage points of the harbor and adjacent waterways, but still no bird.  I ran into a few other birders but they had no luck as well.  It was now 3:30 and I had to take a call, so I pulled into a parking lot and resigned myself that this bird was gone.  Just then I got a text from David that the bird has been relocated at Jodrey Fish Pier in Gloucester, just a couple miles away.  Within five minutes I arrived at the pier, located the other birders, and saw that they had it out in Gloucester Harbor.  We got great views as it swam and perched around the harbor, and even flying low over our heads.  But it was constantly being harassed (indeed attacked!) by Great Black-backed Gulls, and it tried several times to fly away from them.  Just 45 minutes after I got there, the bird flew up overhead, circled well up into the sky, and disappeared to the south.  Unfortunately both Denny and David had not yet arrived, and had missed it by only 5 minutes.  Luckily they both were able to see another Pelican (likely this same bird) the following week as it spent several days around the Boston Harbor.

My statebird map for Brown Pelican is inserted below.  Massachusetts is my 18^th state for this species – with sightings in each Pacific and Gulf state (plus Arizona), and on the Atlantic coastline up through New Jersey.  And of course now I have it in 2 states in New England too.