The Pelican Brief

October 25, 2007

This is a close-up photo of a pelican, which I took yesterday at the zoo in Johor Baru, the southernmost city in the Malaysian peninsula. My camera was about half a metre from the bird, which thankfully, stayed still in that position for a while.

A pelican is any of several very large water birds with a distinctive pouch under the beak belonging to the bird family Pelecanidae, according to Wikipedia. There are several species of pelican, not sure which one this is. This could be from the pink-backed pelican species.

It’s a nice, tame and graceful bird but you still need to be careful when taking their close-up pictures because sometimes they like to peck at moving things.

According to Wikipedia, pelicans have two primary ways of feeding:

Group fishing: used by white pelicans all over the world. They will form a line to chase schools of small fish into shallow water, and then simply scoop them up. Large fish are caught with the bill-tip, then tossed up in the air to be caught and slid into the gullet head first.

Plunge-diving: used almost exclusively by the American Brown Pelican, and rarely by white pelicans like the Peruvian Pelican or the Australian Pelican.

John Grisham has a book titled “The Pelican Brief”. I think I should get a copy.

Posted in Bird Macro