White Pelicans at Oaks Bottom: A First for Everyone on the Trail

I have been walking Oaks Bottom for years, and last week it handed me something I had never seen there: two American White Pelicans, out on open water, acting like they owned the place.

They came hovering in. That is the right word for it. Nothing about a pelican sitting on water prepares you for one in the air.

Pelicans fly low on purpose. Close to the water the air beneath the wing compresses and the lift comes nearly free, so a bird this size can cross a lake without a single beat. Nothing about it looks like effort, which is exactly the point.

A Water Landing

A bird that size puts down the way a seaplane does. Feet forward like floats, wings held wide to bleed off speed, the surface doing the braking. No stall and no drop — just a long shallow approach onto the water.

Nine feet of wing apiece, held out and barely moving, black primaries fanned against the autumn brush. They came down like it cost them nothing.

Like Airplanes at an Air Show

Except the pilots do it for the crowd and the pelicans do it to save fuel.

A wingtip sheds a spinning cone of air, and along the outer edge of that cone the air moves upward. A bird sitting in the right place behind another picks up part of its lift for nothing. It only works if you match your wingbeat to the bird ahead, which is what locks a formation into step. It has been measured in pelicans: flying together, their heart rates drop.

This is not drafting, by the way. Cyclists draft — they tuck in directly behind and sit in the low-pressure pocket. Birds cannot do that, because the air straight behind a wing is pushed down. So they fly beside and slightly behind, never nose to tail, which is why a V is a V and not a line. Look at the photograph again and you can see them holding exactly that position.

We eventually noticed. Both the Air Force and Airbus have run trials flying transport aircraft in a lead plane’s upwash, for the same reason and several million years later.

Note the company, too. The lake was already full of ducks. These two came in over the top of all of it.

Center Stage

They took center stage. Turning slowly, mirroring each other, drifting in circles — a dance in slow motion.

It is also work. Almost everything people picture when they hear pelican comes from the other one. Brown Pelicans fold up and plunge into the surf from forty feet. American White Pelicans never do that. They fish by cooperating, and circling is the method: two birds turning together push fish into a smaller and smaller space until they both dip at once. The slowness is deliberate. Move fast and the fish scatter and the whole thing falls apart.

So the dance is real. It is just that it is also a hunt.

Showing Off

White everywhere except the flight feathers, and those are black right to the tips.

That is not decoration. Melanin makes a feather black, and it also makes it harder and more resistant to wear. The wingtips take more abrasion than any other part of a flying bird, so that is where the melanin goes. Snow geese have it, gannets have it, wood storks have it. A white bird with black wingtips is a bird that reinforced the part that wears out first.

The bill is smooth here, with no horn on it. That is winter dress — the breeding plate grows in spring and drops off once the nesting is done. These were birds between seasons, passing through.

Oregon’s pelicans nest east of the Cascades, in the Klamath Basin and out at Malheur, and move through the valley in spring and fall. Sauvie Island is where you would expect to meet them. Not here, in the bottomland between Sellwood and the river.

What the Back of a Camera Is For

Pelicans that size do not hide, but a lot of people walk the loop watching the path. A white bird out on grey water reads as a gull unless somebody tells you otherwise.

So I spent a good while pointing. Everybody who stopped was surprised, and not one of them had ever seen pelicans here either. I had assumed I had simply never looked up at the right moment in all the years I have been walking it. It turns out nobody had.

Then I turned the camera around and showed them the back of it.

That is the part I did not expect. Out on the water the pelicans were two white shapes. On the screen you could see the bill, the eye, the way the light was sitting along the feathers. People were amazed. A few stayed to look twice.

I have been thinking about it since. The lens is not only for making pictures to take home. Standing on a path with people who have stopped to see what you are pointing at, it is a way of lending someone your eyes for a minute.

They Were Always Up There

I have seen them before over Portland. Very high, in formation, riding thermals the way raptors do — circling up without a wingbeat, then gliding off the top of one and finding the next. It costs almost nothing, which is how a nine-foot bird crosses a continent.

From the ground they are specks that flash as the flock banks. White bellies catch the sun, then the birds roll together and you are looking at black wingtips, then white again. Nothing else that size turns on and off like that, and birders use the flicker to find them at distances where the birds themselves are barely there.

Which means a lot of people in this city have already seen pelicans. They just had no reason to know that is what they were.

That is what the back of a camera was good for that afternoon. Not showing anyone something new — showing them something that had been passing overhead the whole time.