We’re winding up the year sharing the most popular — and we hope most compelling — Flying Lesson stories from 2020. Most of the posts are profiles of bird encounters, including this story of a Great White Pelican that transfixed north Florida birders early this year when the species usually found in Africa and Europe showed up in the U.S. We’re posting one of the highlight pieces each Sunday this month.
It wasn’t a Great White Shark, but for Florida’s best birders, it may as well have been. When the first reports hit that a Great White Pelican – usually found in Africa or India – had been spotted in a wildlife refuge near Titusville, well, you can imagine what happened next.
This is one of the largest birds in the world with a wingspan that can reach 12 feet. And even though it has the strength to cross an ocean without stopping, people couldn’t quite believe it had somehow landed in Florida.
We’re getting ahead of ourselves, but here’s a close-up of our Great White Pelican.
The first photo in early February showed a distant bird that looked like the American White Pelican, only much bigger with a striking orange and pinkish tint. There’s also a diamond-shaped patch of day-glow orange over its eyes.
Then came several sporadic sightings around the Merritt Island National Wildlife Refuge, a vast wilderness spanning 140,000 acres with one 7-mile road winding through. More often than not, the reports were of dashed hopes and a flock of regular pelicans seen from afar.
But the sightings persisted, and Florida Facebook birding sites lit up with speculation about the pelican’s whereabouts. So without much to go on, we drove up from our camping spot an hour south of Titusville to see if we could find this guy.
A fascinating new book by Jennifer Ackerman, The Bird Way, A New Look at How Birds Talk, Work, Play, Parent and Think, says birds have a rich social life. She says the language of birds can be complicated, emotional, and has its own syntax. This book suggests that birds will even lie at times, implying a level of sophistication far beyond what we always thought.
Birdsongs are primarily about mating and defending territory, but exchanges like this one that seem more like household conversations are part of the repertoire as well. The Cornell Lab’s Handbook of Bird Biology, the bible of bird life, says bird pairs of all kinds are constantly seen singing duets, chatting back and forth and sometimes simply working on their relationships by staying in close touch.
The other day I spotted a Red-tailed Hawk perched on an irrigation rig in a field roughly a quarter-mile away. Suddenly it saw something move on the ground near me and was instantly in the air headed straight in our direction.
All summer long, I’ve encountered juvenile birds unsure of how to behave, hesitant as they explored the world for the first time. There was a juvenile Eastern Bluebird who, like this hawk, hung around like we were best friends. Sometimes the young birds will still be in training with their parents. But eventually they have to head out on their own, and many have long migration trips ahead.
  You can usually hear the Ovenbird from a long way off. Its piercing, crystal clear voice cuts through the woods as if singing through a sound system at a Broadway theater.
  The Ovenbird is so loud and consistent that researchers have turned to its songs when needing to study bird audio. The most famous findings dates back to 1958.  
