Great white pelican

Great white pelicans eat fish.

They swim together in a group and push the fish into shallow water. Then they scoop them up.

Great white pelicans eat almost nothing but fish. They usually fish in groups. Swimming in a V-shaped line, they herd fish toward the shore and scoop them up in their pouches, then let the water drain out before they swallow.

They mostly fish early in the morning and early in the evening, and they will fly a long way from their colony to find a good place to feed: ADW says about 60 to 100 kilometers.

IUCN calls the species entirely piscivorous, preferring fish of 300 to 600 grams; ADW (2022) adds that squid, shrimp and the eggs of Cape cormorants and kelp gulls are taken when other food is scarce, and estimates intake at around 1.45 to 2.25 kilograms of food a day. Birds usually fish in flocks of 8 to 12 (up to 123), mostly in the early morning and early evening, and regularly fly long distances from breeding or roosting colonies to feed (IUCN).

ADW describes flocks of up to 20 birds swimming in a V-shaped formation that drives fish toward the shore, where the birds scoop them up in a coordinated way, drain the water from the pouch and swallow; it gives foraging flights of 60 to 100 kilometers from the colony, and notes that pelicans sometimes fish alongside great cormorants.

Great white pelicans like to be together.

When they fly far away for the winter, a flock can have hundreds of birds.

Great white pelicans are social birds: they live, fish, fly and nest in groups. They migrate in large flocks of 50 to 500 birds.

To scare off a predator, a pelican may give a threatening call, push its head forward and open and close its bill. Foxes, gulls, crows and other birds sometimes take their eggs.

The species is congregatory: it migrates in flocks of 50 to 500 birds (IUCN, citing Snow and Perrins 1998). ADW (2022) gives migration rates of about 133 to 160 kilometers a day at 30 to 44.5 kilometers an hour, with larger flocks on longer migrations, and notes roosting on rocks, on the ground and in trees.

Egg predators include foxes, gulls, frigatebirds, African fish eagles, crows and skuas; most predation on land happens at night, when the birds are on the nest. A threatened pelican may release an odor from its preen gland, give a threatening call, push its head forward and open and close its bill (ADW).

Pelicans need clean lakes full of fish.

People build safe rafts for them to nest on.

The great white pelican is listed as least concern: there are still a lot of them. But when wetlands are drained or rivers are used to water farm fields, pelicans lose their homes. Pollution in lakes, hunting, disturbance at nesting colonies, power lines and fishing nets are other dangers.

In the northern part of its range, people have helped by building floating rafts and platforms as safe nesting places, putting markers on power lines or burying them, and stringing lines over fish ponds so pelicans cannot take the farmed fish.

BirdLife International assessed Pelecanus onocrotalus as Least Concern for the IUCN Red List (assessed 4 September 2020, published 2021): about 265,000 to 295,000 individuals (Wetlands International 2015), placed in the band 260,000 to 300,000, with an unknown trend; the separate European assessment (assessed 18 December 2020, published 2021) gives an increasing European population of 18,700 to 40,700 mature individuals. IUCN lists it as possibly extinct in Montenegro and Serbia and extinct in Hungary.

IUCN names wetland drainage and river diversion for irrigation, pollution (DDT used against malaria mosquitoes thinning eggs, PCBs, agricultural runoff), hunting and persecution at fish farms, tourism disturbance at colonies, water-level changes, power-line collisions, drowning in fishing nets and possibly wind farms. Floating rafts and platforms, rebuilt nesting islands, marked or buried power lines and strings over aquaculture ponds have helped in the Palearctic. It is listed on Appendix I of the Convention on Migratory Species.