Brown Pelicans on the move.

Another sure sign of fall: the brown pelicans are gathering into groups.  I've been seeing them at the north end of the bridge over the Columbia River, gliding on the thermals near the water, ancient silhouettes in the sunset.  These brown pelicans spend the winter in Mexico and farther south.  I've seen them at the river's mouth, lounging in the boat basin in San Blas, Nayarit, Mexico, in January.  They keep company with the frigate birds, enormous black sea-going birds that are only seen on land during breeding season.  They look like folded black umbrellas, roosting in the palms in the hot sun.

Whether you're a believer in climate change or not, something has caused the pelicans to risk spending the past few winters up north.  Not so much this past year, but the one prior to that, we had huge numbers of wintering pelicans.  They did not do well.  It was warm at first, rainy but not cold.  Then the weather got serious and the pelicans suffered.  They're not built for the cold, and somehow, once migration time is over, the impulse is lost. 
At the wildlife center, we started to see pelicans brought in who were starving. The way you can tell a malnourished bird is by the keel bone, or breast bone.  Birds should have plump breast muscle on both sides, so that the keel bone is there, but you have to dig a bit to find it.  These had protuberant keel bones; they had been hungry for awhile.  We had pelicans who had frozen feet. The sickest pelicans developed frost bite on the delicate webbing between their long toes.  That webbing helps them to swim, forming  efficient paddles of their big feet.  On these unlucky birds, we had to wait until the flesh died off completely, then carefully cut off the dead tissue with manicure scissors.  Pelicans aren't fond of holding still for such procedures, so it usually took three of us to hold and snip.
Pelicans live with parasitic lice in their mouths.  Every bird that came in needed to be treated for feather lice, then for oral lice.  One volunteer held the bird, and if possible, held the bill open.  If it was a rambunctious bird, another volunteer held the bill open, while a third, using long forceps, carefully picked the black bugs from the mouth and dropped them in water.  Each bird doesn't have many, maybe ten or so, but pelican breath isn't the most pleasant, plus those birds are strong!  They would watch us with large dark eyes, as we held their heads in gloved hands. 
We would let them have free range in the center once they felt OK, so that they could walk around and use their muscles, get used to altered feet.  They learned very quickly that humans mean food, so as you would pass by a pelican, you would have to be on the lookout for a solid prod in the backside by one of those huge bills if you didn't have a fish as a peace offering.  They put away a lot of fish; if you think of a kitty litter box full of water and ten inch fish, that was one meal of two for each pelican, each day.
Fortunately, once they were together in the outside pen, they became quite wild again, avoiding the humans as much as possible. 
As fall comes on, I watch the flocks of pelicans and hope that they will follow their instinct to go south.  Long skeins of them, wings fixed, gliding just over the water, moving as a body up and down with the waves, pterodactyl faces, so beautiful.