These Brown Pelicans were photographed by my daughter, Julie Talcott-Fuller.  They look just like the pelcians I saw today off the beach at Brookings, Oregon.  Except my pelicans did not have the Golden Gate Bridge behind them.  My new-old pelicans had only fog and mist and low-lying ocean swells.  In the first line there were eight young birds, in the second only seven.  They are such a familiar sight.  One I witnessed nearly every day for over twenty years, May through December in San Francisco’s outer Richmond District.  But here they were new again.  I had never seen a Brown Pelican in Oregon before.  Oregon lifer #208.

Even when I have seen them a hundfred times off the Oregon Coast…and I will should I live long enough, the easy coasting flight, the long beak leading a body that seems too dense to float in the air, the typical line of birds, one just off the first bird’s tail and so on to the end of the line…it will always be a thrill for I shall never forget how rare they were along the Pacific shorelines before we humans stopped using DDT in America.

There were other seabirds as well: Surf Scoters, Barn Swalloows along the sand, Willets. A Double-crested Cormorant.  Numerous Western Gulls in a dizzying array of plumages.  And far out over the waves a line of black over white footballs moving forward on stubby pointed wings, three Common Murre.