BAL HARBOUR, Fla. – When it comes to human interaction with wildlife, people definitely cause a lot of problems, especially when it comes to destroying habitat, causing pollution and sometimes just getting too close for comfort or even feeding wild animals.
A beautiful day at the Bal Harbor Pier, for example, turned tragic and nearly fatal for two pelicans at the exact same time.
Rescuers from Pelican Harbor Seabird Station arrived to take in a limping pelican suffering from an injury to one of its legs, but then they discovered something even more disturbing.
“While we were out there, we actually had someone come up to us and tell us that they had just witnessed a different pelican go over and eat somebody’s bag of bait,” Hannah McDougall, of Pelican Harbor Seabird Station, said. “If someone had not actually seen it happen, we would have no idea that this pelican had swallowed a plastic bag.”
A plastic bag can be deadly to a pelican or to any animal, and plastic bags also cause huge problems for our environment.
“It was a big bag of bait, so it was chicken and all sorts of other chum that fishermen use and it was a plastic bag,” Amanda Burke said.
Burke is a wildlife rehabilitator at PHSS, so she is used to the tell-tale signs of pelican versus fishermen.
“He had a bunch of these little tears in his pouch, so these are old hook scars,” she explained to Burch.
Pelicans are known to take the easy way out when they go “fishing” by bagging their competition’s catch, which is also why line entanglements and fish hooks are the leading cause of death for brown pelicans.
“We get a lot of fishing hooks and sometimes little small plastic items or plastic bags, balloons, things like that. But an entire plastic bag of chum -- I think that was a first for us, for sure,” Burke said.
Which is why there were detailed discussions about the best way to save the young pelican.
“We were kind of formulating a plan -- are we going to be able to go in manually and retrieve it? Are we going to have to do surgery? But thankfully, he kinda took care of that for us, because the next morning we came in and he had regurgitated the Ziploc bag,” McDougall said.
The original pelican with the leg wound would not be as blessed and, unfortunately, had to be euthanized due to his extreme injuries.
“Pelicans and all of our native wildlife are facing many challenges -- almost all of them human-related -- so that’s why we try to, of course, rehabilitate them, but we want to reduce the cause of injury to start with,” McDougall said.
About 9,000 birds have been saved over four decades by Pelican Harbor, but these days, the numbers are dwindling. When it comes to wildlife -- where there are people, there are problems.
So what can you do?
- Never feed pelicans or any wildlife -- it’s illegal!
- Never toss unused lines in the water -- discard properly.
- Be extremely careful with fishing hooks.
- Always cover bait buckets.
And avoid plastics at all costs -- especially when you are near waterways.