White Pelican Winters

Many winters, flocks of white pelicans stop in Baton Rouge, Louisiana.  Some, after a respite, fly further south.  Others make their winter home on the shallow waters of two lakes near the heart of the city. 

The lakes are artificial; swampland dredged some eight decades ago to become the bucolic center of a park, ringed with sentinel oaks and neighborhoods of dignified, even stately, homes.  They are thoroughly urban lakes, occasionally slicked with iridescent run-off from the busy roads around them, and fringed with sunbathers and bicyclists.

The pelicans themselves seem thoroughly urban, civilized birds, correct in their winter quarters.  No mottled country coloring: they are white, clean-lined, and graphic, with an underline of black punctuating half-folded wings.  They are as crisp and modern-looking as the white-billed black coots that bobble in the shoreline wavelets during the same season. 

Throughout the winter, groups of swimming pelicans crisscross and circle the bounds of the lakes, as steady as flotillas of paddleboats, but less boisterous.  Scarcely disturbing the water’s surface, they seem as dignified as medieval courtiers, and their long orange bills an embellishment as absurd as the pointed, princess hats of fairy-tales.  There appears, too, something of the enforced idleness of a medieval court, as they while away their time in slow circuits around the lakes. Most often they glide quietly in their ranks, a few drifting off, as if for a moment of intrigue, before rejoining their peers. The large preening movements of their heads and bills seem practiced, theatrical gestures. 

Civilized, too, seem their cooperative feasts.  A small bayou descends through a golf course into the north side of one lake.  Near its opening, groups of pelicans glide to and fro in perfect synchronization, quietly paddling the fish beneath them into a smaller and smaller area.  On cue, the birds dip together in a raucous scramble of flapping and splashing foam.  After a brief sieve and gulp, decorous silence resumes, as if they had never indulged, a moment ago, in such wanton gluttony.

On colder, rainy days, some cluster in a shallow bend. Occasionally, on some more urgent business, a few make quick, low flight from one end of the lake to another, or from one lake to another.  Mostly they are seen, through the winter, on their slow swimming processionals around and around the lakes, in patterns and purposes known only to them.  They are tolerant of their fellow park citizens: the power-walkers, the strollers, the Frisbee players.

Then on a clear day, they loft themselves.  Their heads retract.  They unfold powerful wings wider than a man, and they soar, as well as hawks, on a warming thermal, before they point their long bills, like compass points, to a destination far past the city.  Now they are not courtiers or boats or princesses.  They are giant beasts of birds.  They are not modern or medieval, or anything human.  They are prehistoric, the shadow of pterosaurs, and only slightly younger in lineage. They rise higher and higher as the lakes shrink to silver coins below them.  If not disdainful, then they are, perhaps, unmindful of our human artifacts of parks and roads, and boundaries, and metaphors.