I've always been somewhat puzzled by the appearance of white pelicans in Colorado, but never more so than this spring. There must be hundreds of them in the Loveland region this year, maybe thousands.
First off, I just instinctively associate these huge, fish-eating birds with salt-water seashores, coastal bays and estuaries, not the semi-arid American plains or the Rocky Mountain West. As it turns out, I'm at least partially right: Pelicans do, in fact, winter along the Mexican Gulf Coast from Florida to Central America and parts of southern California, but they migrate through the center of the country on their way to breeding grounds in the Canadian Prairie Provinces of British Columbia, Alberta, Manitoba, Saskatchewan and wherever suitable habitat is found in northern California, Nevada, and — ta-da — Colorado.
It wasn't always so, though — not, at least, until settlers began building the extensive network of irrigation reservoirs and interconnecting supply ditches that now feed Colorado's agricultural trade. All of this was nicely explained by local naturalist Kevin Cook in an article that appeared in the Reporter-Herald last spring.
Interestingly, while thousands of the pelicans that migrate through the state may linger through the summer, only a relative few will actually breed here because pelicans will only breed on islands — a defense mechanism used to prevent land based predators like raccoons, foxes, bobcats and coyotes from devouring the vulnerable, ground dwelling pelican chicks for the long weeks that they are unable to fly — also nicely explained in Cook's column.
Of more particular interest to me and other fishermen perhaps, is the other half of the story.
Irrigation reservoirs alone weren't enough to hold the migrating pelicans' interests. The big fish eaters also needed a reliable food supply, and that was furnished by the introduction and stocking of sport fish species — large and smallmouth bass, white bass, walleyes, catfish, trout, etc. to satisfy the growing number of recreational anglers in the state, followed in turn by the stocking of prey species — emerald shiners, rainbow smelt, gizzard shad and several others — to feed the predator fish.
Now Colorado had just about everything migrating pelicans needed for a comfortable summer hangout — with the possible exception of enough natural islands to sustain a serious breeding population.
"So what?" the birds must have thought. They had easy access to lots of fresh water for roosting, and lots of fresh fish to eat. Two out three ain't half bad, right? And so they began to stay. More and more of them came, and more of them lingered longer and longer. Birdwatchers and nature lovers were enthralled.
But fishermen weren't happy about the thousands of pelicans slaughtering what must surely be tons of game fish on their favorite reservoirs.
Personally, and this is only an opinion, I don't think they need to worry much. I recently spent several hours each day for many days observing and photographing hundreds of pelicans feeding at the inlet delta of Horseshoe Reservoir. While it's possible they may have eaten an errant white bass or two, they were positively murdering big gizzard shad by the thousands.
Apart from witnessing firsthand the raw savagery of a life-and-death wildlife drama unfold before my eyes (imagine being swallowed live), it also occurred to me that those pelicans were probably benefitting Horseshoe's sport fish — and fishermen — by selectively culling vast numbers of a grossly overpopulated prey base from the fishery.
Dennis Smith is a Loveland outdoors writer and photographer, and his freelance work is published nationally. Smith's Home Waters column appears on the first and third Thursdays of the month. He can be reached at Dsmith7136@msn.com.