Brown Pelicans have been enduring a mysterious ailment and nobody knows why. Photo: Nikolai Barkats
As I veered north along the coast, towards Will Rogers Beach, I noticed something odd. Droves of careless tourists peppered the bike path, but they started thinning slightly. The bike traffic slowed. People gawked. A three-foot-tall bird had come waddling down the trail, unfazed by passing cyclists – a Brown Pelican. It strutted clumsily, like a dodo bird, then settled on a small dune. I flagged down a lifeguard, but he wasn’t too concerned. “Yeah they’ve been showing up,” he explained. “Nobody’s going to come down here tonight. We’ll call someone if it’s still there in the morning.” The bird took shallow breaths, and stared curiously at the Pacific Ocean.
I didn’t know it at the time, but encounters like I’d had weren’t uncommon. That struggling bird I saw was part of a 2022 mass stranding event, in which California Brown Pelicans showed up along the Pacific coast by the hundreds. The same thing happened again in 2024, but this time the birds pressed into increasingly urban areas. In May, rescuers retrieved several near the lake at SoFi stadium. This past summer, footage of a Bay Area brown pelican interrupting a Giants game went viral. In fact, reports as far back as 2012 detail starved, dying pelicans arriving en masse along California shorelines. The most baffling thing, though, is that nobody is certain why.
Even before the stranding events, Brown Pelicans had a long, troubled history. Prior to the migratory bird act of 1918, the birds were hunted both for their feathers and by fishermen who saw them as pests. The population then recovered, until DDT waste put the bird on the endangered species list in 1970. A 1972 DDT ban led to gradual recovery, and Brown Pelicans were ultimately removed from the endangered species list in 2009.
However, increased populations have coincided with increased starvation and deaths. In a 2024 report with CNN, California Department of Fish and Wildlife Public Information Officer Tim Daly stated that postmortem examinations indicate emaciation as the cause of the most recent stranding event. The birds are struggling to feed themselves.
There’s no single explanation as to why this is happening. Bird flu has been ruled out, but experts have other theories. Dr. Elizabeth Wood is a clinical veterinarian and Medical Director of the Wetlands Wildlife Care Center (WWCC) in Huntington Beach. She stated the issue may be tied to the way the bird hunts. California Brown Pelicans are the only pelican species in the world known to plunge-dive for food. They’ll launch air-strikes from as high as 60 feet, diving deep and scooping up fish along with gallons of seawater. “There’s lots of hypotheses about changing ocean currents,” Wood explained on a video call, “Are there fish that are just driven deeper in the water column? Is there something else changing?”
Beyond new threats like changing currents and rising sea levels, old threats to Brown Pelicans have also resurfaced. In 2021, 25,000 leaking, abandoned barrels of DDT were found in the ocean. Dr. Rebbecca Duerr, clinical veterinarian and Research Director of California’s International Bird Rescue (or IBR, a non-profit aquatic bird rehabilitation center), detailed new DDT-related findings in a video call. “I’m currently a co-principal investigator on a project looking at current DDT contamination in these animals,” Duerr explained, “and the pelicans are contaminated.” Per Duerr’s investigation, DDT metabolites are being found in Brown Pelicans that did not survive the 2024 rehabilitation process. However, a correlation between the DDT levels found in the birds and the recent stranding events isn’t clear yet.
Instead, Duerr suggests a resource problem. “There’s a patchy distribution of food [in the ocean], and humans are overfishing the population biology of the prey items [Brown Pelicans] eat,” Duerr said. Stranding events occur in late spring. The birds fly north from their breeding sites on the Channel Islands and in Baja California, struggle finding food along their migratory path, and “run out of gas,” as Duerr puts it.
When it comes to supply, Duerr stresses the importance of fish being available to Brown Pelicans “during the time that they need it and in the place that they need it.” The bird is tenacious, migrating from as far south as Mexico to as far north as Vancouver Island. They fly long distances in short periods of time. Some of the rehabilitated birds released from IBR’s San Francisco center flew 600 miles in 12 days. “They can fly a long distance to find dinner,” Duer explained, “The trouble comes [when] it’s 400 miles of nothing to eat.”
Brown Pelicans primarily feed on anchovies, but, according Laird Henkel, Senior Environmental Scientist-Supervisor with California Fish and Wildlife, “The overall abundance of the [anchovy] population seems to be okay.” He postulated that odd wind events near the Channel Islands during both 2022 and 2024 may have affected either the distribution of anchovies in the Pacific or the pelicans’ ability to see them, which could have triggered a snowball effect in which the birds were deprived of food for several days, which in turn weakened them and their hunting skills in the days that followed.
However, that’s not the only possible culprit for the starving birds. While anchovies make up the bulk of their diet, sardines are another primary source of food for Brown Pelicans, and research from ocean conservation non-profit Oceana shows that sardine populations declined dramatically during the 2010s, with overfishing as one of the primary causes. In fact, fishing creates ample other problems for the bird, as well. In particular, they are prone to injuries caused by abandoned gear and other man-made refuse.
As for avoiding a potential 2025 mass stranding event, Henkel emphasized the importance of collecting and analyzing data from 2022 and 2024. “Without fully understanding what happened,” Henkel said “it’s hard to prepare for the future.” Unlike oil spill response, Henkel stressed that there’s no set framework for how to respond to wildlife emergencies with natural causes (however unnatural they may seem). Building a plan requires support from rehabilitation and research facilities. Researchers are continuing to collect data, new and old. IBR is tracking rehabilitated Brown Pelicans with newly developed electronic bird bands.
However, while experts were learning on the fly during prior stranding events, the WWCC has held training events for the lifeguards and animal control officers that might get calls about birds in distress. Should a 2025 stranding event occur, “It’ll be the first time that there’s a preemptive effort” said Wood. “The task force will be ready, the community volunteers will be on alert, the messaging to the public will be ready to be made public. Hopefully it’ll not be needed, but if it is needed, hopefully it’ll be more preemptive than reactive.”
If you encounter an animal in distress, you can reference the WWCC’s Found Animal Guide, LA Audubon Society’s list of wildlife rehabilitation resources, find wildlife rehabilitation centers here, or use this link to report a stranding.
