The Brown Pelican of Alcatraz

BY Mccabe Coolidge

The tide is coming in, swirling movement in coastal waters lapping on shore as gull and egret sun themselves. The cormorant slowly unfolds her wings, standing on an abandoned dock on the lee side of this island, is drying her feathers. Into this quiet repose comes a splash, a flutter, with a couple of gulls winging over my head to the newly troubled waters.

A twisting dark creature comes bobbing up. The Brown Pelican! My favorite bird since my first sighting on the coast of North Carolina in 1970. I paddle my forest green canoe to watch this bird more closely hoping that he has caught some fish in his gullet. I do not see the traditional routine of raised jaw, fish, head first, heading toward his pouch. This pelican faces into the wind and after several wing flaps is aloft and on the search and only then do I notice two sentries, not more than a hundred yards distant in this estuary, on the north side of this tiny island, named Coast Guard, sandwiched in between the cities of Oakland and Alameda.

The pelican flies north, 20 feet above the water, just outside the watermark where I can see bottom. I paddle lightly against the beginning of the incoming tide. The two vigilant pelicans are still in the water, watching the one fishing. All is silent out here. After a year or two, pelicans lose their voices. As the pelican flies over my head circling, I notice a lighter-colored belly than the adults––this is a juvenile! Maybe these two brown pelicans watching the manuevers are his silent mentors. Maybe these two oldtimers are staying close, signaling where the schools of minnows might be. Maybe they too are worried about their offspring. The Brown Pelican is on California’s endangered species list.
In 1775, Spanish explorer Juan Manuel de Ayala sailed into San Francisco Bay and named the island Alcatraz, Spanish for pelican, because “The island was so barren and craggy that it could provide no shelter even for small craft and it was called Alcatraces because of the large number of them that were there.”

Craig Glassner, Alcatraz district ranger, says there probably haven’t been Brown Pelicans on that island for as long as anyone can remember. “Tour and fishing boats, seagulls, and cormorants have made this island unsafe for the nesting of Brown Pelicans. Not to mention the penal colony located on this island in the twentieth century. I see some pelicans from time to time diving into the protected waters that are closed to ferries and fishing boats. That’s about it.”

The juvenile is fluttering his wings coming to a stall in mid-air and then plunges straight like an arrow into the late December glitter of blue water. I have to shade my eyes to see the impact. He lifts his nose up, shakes it a bit, and I see the wiggle of a fish. He’s successful. He turns into the wind and takes flight, as do his two companions. I watch them as they head west up the estuary toward Jack London Square.

The Brown Pelican is Lousiana’s state bird. In 1961, there were no more Brown Pelicans in that state; they had become extinct. Even after DDT was banned in 1972, the Brown Pelican did not make a comeback, so they transplanted Brown Pelicans from the west coast of Florida onto some barrier islands off the coast of Louisiana. Only recently has that effort been successful.
In this state, the runoff from rivers and streams carries agricultural pollution right into the San Francisco Bay. All fish ingest these chemicals. The Brown Pelican eats these contaminated fish, then lays thin-layered eggs and roosts on them. Either they break open prematurely or the weight of the mother roosting breaks them.

But at the mouth of this estuary an extraordinary event is occurring. The Brown Pelican is establishing a beachhead along the breakwater, a line of concrete and rubble, just above the high tide line. More than 200 pelicans have been spotted there, nesting at night. A protective sanctuary. The remarkable part of this story is this: The Least Tern, another endangered species, came first. Even before the Naval Air Base was closed down, the Least Tern flew in, laid eggs just outside old runway No. 1, and the naval personnel recognized this and built a fenced-in space for their nesting and to keep their chicks from wandering out into the runways. Once the base closed in the late 1980s, the Least Tern colony has continued to grow and thrive. And now here comes the Brown Pelican.

In the late 1970s, when I visited the North Carolina coast, I noticed the return of the Osprey, who built incredibly large nests on top of the channel markers along the Intercoastal Waterway. Then, in the 1980s, I noticed an increase in the flights of the Brown Pelican leaving at dawn and heading south, then returning at nightfall. What these pelicans found was safe “dredge or spoil” islands. The Army Corps of Engineers deepened the channel of the Intercoastal Waterway by dredging and depositing the spoils outside the channel, thus creating new islands without trees or any cover for prey to hide. These uninhabitable patches of land became the nursery for the pelican to nest and raise her young. But the first inhabitant of those tiny islands was the tern.

On three successive days before Christmas of 2001, I paddled my canoe over to the leeside of Coast Guard Island and there I witnessed these two observers and the one juvenile, stalling in the light air, then diving. About 50 percent successful now, he would fly off, closely followed by his guardians. Riding the light air, lifted by the occasional thermal, they would follow the estuary west, eventually alighting on that deserted tip of Alameda Island, home to the tern and now the pelican.

Why, when in states like North Carolina the Brown Pelican has been taken off the endangered species list, does she remain endangered in this state? According to Dana Kokubun, project officer of the Golden Gate Audubon Society, the encroachment of human development up and down the coast has prevented the pelican from brooding on safe edges of land. We hike, boat, climb, fly, bike all along the water’s edge but not at the tip of Alameda Island. Humans are fenced out, we can’t get within a mile of that rocky coast. The kind of land that Juan Manuel de Ayala knew was essential for the homesite of the Brown Pelican.

On the day after New Year’s, my partner and I canoed out and around Coast Guard Island at low tide. This part of the estuary is welcoming water for birds that don’t migrate in the winter and those that do, such as a new raft of American Wigeons, huddled in the low-lying waters in front of Quinn’s Restaurant. As we circumnavigated the island, I saw no pelicans. The next day, I sailed our boat out toward the end of the estuary, just past Jack London Square, and there they were, the three pelicans circling, fishing, riding the warm air currents as if they were gentle incoming swells. The waters are deeper here, not the 5’ to 10’ where I was paddling near Coast Guard Island, but up to 50’ in the middle of the channel. They dive, plop up, bills heavenward, gulls alighting nearby for surplus catch, then a big swallow and down the gullet. Soon they are airborne, a team of three, past the Oakland Port and Alameda Ferry docks, out to the tip of the island. A new home, shared only with the neighboring Least Tern, who for this season has headed south toward Mexico.

The City of Alameda wants to develop the abandoned base but is well aware of its value as a sanctuary. So far, precautions have been made to protect the homesite of the Least Tern. Waiting in line is the Brown Pelican. Its new haven has a most spectacular view of the City of San Francisco.
Chris Bandy, an employee of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service as acting supervisor of the Alameda Wildlife Refuge, told me that, “The breakwater at the tip of the island is the only nighttime roost for the Brown Pelican in the entire Bay Area.” Like the Least Tern, will she also be protected? Will this mile of rocky coast become the sacred site of her return, her patient and intuitive attempt to thrive and leave the label “endangered” behind? Or will we humans disregard the ancient wisdom of this mythological bird and bulldoze the concrete and the rubble away to make building sites clamoured for by humans who want a restful view?

In those seven days late in the year 2000, between Christmas and New Year’s, I flew back to the coast of North Carolina. On a windy, bitterly chilly morning, I went for a long walk along the waterfront of Beaufort, facing Bird Island, now named Rachel Carson Estuarine Sanctuary. I first spotted the wild ponies grazing just above the high tide zone but soon, out of the east, came a long line of Brown Pelicans, rising out of the orange dawn. Like a taut thread pulling them up and then loosing them, one by one, they would angle back down to the waterline just above the rippled water, coasting until I thought surely they would drop into the icy waters. I held my breath, but one by one, they caught an updraft and rose up to 15 feet, then headed out of the inlet toward the protected tip of Fort Macon, the end of a barrier island, where there are miles of good fishing, no cottages, and on this frigid day, few beach combers.

That is what I want for my newly adopted waters of Northern California. Sanctuary. Sanctuary, not just for the overly-stressed human inhabitants of the Bay Area, but also for the Bay’s wildlife. Let the Brown Pelican follow the Least Tern. Will we become partners with these endangered ones and set aside wild coastal and bay areas, protected from humans, made safe by cleaning up the polluted waters upstream?

Isn’t it within our domain to be enchanted by the silent vigil of the pelican? Isn’t the pelican the one who survives on our “trash fish?” What if your eyes and my eyes no longer have the undulating image of her flight imprinted on our brain? This prehistoric bird is trying to make a comeback right in our own backyard.

It’s dusk, about 5:00 p.m. on the eve of Martin Luther King holiday. 2001. As I step out of my sailboat, I hear the faint sounds of pipe music. “Darn,” I say to myself, “I forgot.”
“You’d better come up here!” I yelled down to my wife.

Normally, I canoed over to Coast Guard Island on Sunday evening as a way to say goodbye to the day and to a weekend full of stress and hard physical work at a day homeless shelter. Giving a safe harbor for a number of hours to another endangered species, humans without safe habitats. These quiet waters caressed by pink, wispy traces of sunset would calm my soul.

In late summer of 2000, I discovered that a bagpiper had also chosen a different sort of vespers ritual. While I was busy poking around the dark waters, he was on high ground just above me, walking and piping.