Brown Pelicans at the Beach...

There is usually a camp animal on our trips. Most of the time it's the catfish but sometimes we camp in places where we watch the alligators swimming by, the deer come up to be hand fed or maybe there are armadillos waddling through the underbrush. I guess on our beach trip the camp animal was the brown pelican. Cathy says that in her youth when she was fishing with family in the Galveston area these huge birds were almost extinct due to pesticide use by humans and the first attempts to protect the species from hunting were when Teddy Roosevelt set aside Pelican Island in Florida as a wildlife refuge in 1903.   

Cathy caught some good photos on her phone but I managed to get a photo of her talking a good photo of the pelicans. They seem to line up to fly in single file sometimes out over the water but they seemed to also like following the dune line which ran right behind our camper.  

Birds are a big deal to us and we see many kinds during all the times we spend near the water. We and most of our dirty hippie tree hugging friends have an app on the phone that identifies bird calls. That's kind of hard to use when it's noisy like from wind and surf but around the house when sitting on the deck is when I get the most service from this technology. It seems to be very accurate and when it IDs the call and shows a picture of the bird I have usually already visualized it so it helps match call and species. 

The weather is just turning hot so we have the air on but just a week ago we were still sleeping with the bedroom door open to the deck and in the mornings I would wake to busy bird calling. A split screen, it's opening held together by magnets to keep it shut to bugs hangs in the doorway and hearing these calls I dreamed I slipped my hand holding my phone through the opening to try and pick up some of the sound. I looked at the phone app and it identified the call as coming from a bird called a Joy Jamar. 

Cathy later told me that in the eighth grade her and a girl named Joy Jamar got sent to the principle's office. I think she's gaslighting me. Not about the trip to the principle's office but about the girl named Joy Jamar.      

I don't think these birds are good to eat but Teddy protected them because they were hunted for their feathers. In Latin America, the Caribbean and occasionally the U.S people still collect the eggs to eat. The banning of DDT basically saved the species but the thing most likely to do a pelican in is discarded hooks and fishing line.