SANTA CRUZ — For weeks, hundreds of starving California Brown Pelicans have been turning up weak and disoriented on beaches in Santa Cruz County and much of the state with experts unable to offer a definitive explanation.
According to Eve Egan, executive director of Native Animal Rescue which has been leading the local response effort, the nonprofit rescued 200 pelicans from April 18 to May 12 — that’s 163 more than it cared for in 2020 and 2021 combined. Egan estimated that about 80% of the pelicans have come from Main Beach and Cowell Beach in Santa Cruz.
“I felt desperate,” Egan told the Sentinel, reflecting on the early days of the response. At one point, Egan’s team took in 23 pelicans in a single day. “There was room enough to walk and that was it. It was like wall-to-wall crates of pelicans.”
Local and state officials have said the last time a “stranding event” — pelicans seemingly dazed and stranded on shore — approached this magnitude was in 2022, but Egan said that year the shelter still took in only 59 pelicans.
The Native Animal Rescue crew is mostly involved in the initial response effort which includes taking in the birds, keeping them warm, hydrating and feeding them fish. Once they are strong enough to eat, some of the birds get transferred to the International Bird Rescue’s facility in Fairfield for longer-term care and rerelease into the wild.
But many don’t make it that far. Of the 200 pelicans taken in, 122 have been transferred to the next facility while 78 either died or had to be euthanized due to injuries, according to Egan.
“They’ve lost half their body weight,” said Egan. “They’re really just feathers and bones, some of them when they come in.”
Still, Egan was somewhat relieved to report Friday that the pace of intakes has slowed in recent days, with an average of only one pelican entering the animal rescue’s facility for the past week or so.
Working theory
But the issue is far from being isolated to Santa Cruz County. According to Tim Daly, a spokesperson for the California Department of Fish and Wildlife, similar cases of emaciated brown pelicans have emerged along the coast from Santa Cruz to San Diego counties since late April.
As of May 17, more than 450 pelicans were receiving care at rehabilitation facilities statewide and about 380 had died since April, according to Daly.
Though the root cause of the crisis is still being investigated, lab tests on the deceased pelicans have come back negative for any diseases.
“This is not bird flu,” said Daly. “The cause of death for all of the ones we looked at was emaciation — they starved to death.”
One of the leading theories for what is happening, Daly noted, could be traced back to intense early-spring storms that hit the California coast in April. Researchers with the state agency have postulated that the high winds and choppy waters whipped up during the deluges may have created poor visibility conditions that prevented the pelicans from scooping up fish swimming beneath the surface.
“It seems very possible that the birds just simply weren’t able to see the fish that they dive for,” said Daly, adding that similar storms were observed around the time of the 2022 stranding event. “That’s a good theory. We don’t know that for sure, but that’s a good theory.”
Daly said anyone that comes across a pelican that appears dazed, injured, or non-reactive to its surroundings should call the nearest rescue facility and refrain from approaching the animal.
According to the National Park Service website, the California Brown Pelican can dive from as high as 60 feet to retrieve food from the ocean and can gulp down 4 pounds of fish in a single day. Faced with possible extinction in the 1960s and 1970s, the federal government declared the brown pelican to be endangered in 1970 and California followed suit a year later.
Recovery efforts were enough to warrant the bird’s removal from the Federal List of Endangered and Threatened Wildlife in 2009, according to the parks service.
Financial toll
Despite things trending in the right direction locally, the response to the influx of struggling birds has come at a steep cost for local and regional groups.
During a special meeting held Wednesday with the county’s Fish and Wildlife Advisory Commission, Native Animal Rescue asked for $2,210 while the International Bird Rescue requested $6,350 in emergency grant funding for costs incurred during the recent response.
For Native Animal Rescue, some of the high-price needs included rental of a U-Haul to transport the high volume of birds and the purchase of 280 pounds of sardines to make up for food deficits.
International Bird Rescue, which serves as an animal referral hospital for more than two dozen agencies across the state, has received 110 brown pelicans from Santa Cruz County since April while it may only take in 23 in a typical year, according to its grant application.
Phil Kohlmetz, the organization’s grants coordinator, told the advisory group this week that the acute nature of the crisis might be tailing off but “it is by no means over.”
Kohlmetz added that many pelicans, in their desperate search for food, have arrived with physical injuries after getting entangled in fishing lines or nets.
“They’re just engaging in riskier and riskier behavior to try to find some source of nutrition,” said Kohlmetz, adding that each pelican patient is expected to need 21-28 days of rehabilitation before release back into the wild. “This is a rather expensive response to be conducting.”
The county commission unanimously recommended providing the pair of organizations with the requested grant funding and the final decision now moves to the Board of Supervisors who are expected to consider it at a June 4 or June 25 meeting.
Information about how to support the ongoing response effort is at nativeanimalrescue.org and birdrescue.org.