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 two weeks ago 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 spottings 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.
About 4,000 Florida Scrub Jays remain in a handful of scattered Central Florida patches of elevated scrub land that sit on sandy soil, with low bushy growth and few trees. As development consumes what’s left of this habitat, state and county researchers are waging a campaign to keep the jays from dwindling further, to the point of moving whole families when their territories are threatened.
Two dozen Great Egrets stood clustered in a shallow pond as if in a ballet rehearsal. They moved along in groups of threes and fours in precise formation. With their long thin necks lining up one minute and crisscrossing the next, they seemed choreographed for elegance.
In late summer, as the hummingbirds are preparing to migrate halfway across the hemisphere, they are in the midst of a feeding frenzy to bulk up for the journey. They consume their entire weight in nectar each day, which the Audubon Society calculated was the equivalent of a human drinking 18 gallons of milk.
