Wild With Nature

They’re like a flurry of snow in the Montana summer. American white pelicans: massive white birds with chunky orange bills and black wingtips. On the sandbar where Prickly Pear Creek empties into Lake Helena, it’s common to see dozens of them, soaking up the sun more than 30 miles from the nearest nesting colony, on Canyon Ferry Lake. And although visitors to the state are often surprised that Montana, so far from the coast, has pelicans, they’re actually a common sight in the summer.

American white pelicans breed among the prairies, deserts, and forests of the western North American interior, from California and Colorado to Alberta and Manitoba. Across this diverse geographical expanse, they nest in dense colonies, choosing islands within certain marshes or lakes that provide some protection from predators. The nests, often spaced just a few feet apart, can number a thousand or more in a colony. 

Gregarious living

It’s not just nesting, either: almost every aspect of American white pelican life involves groups. They soar in groups, their nine-foot wingspans outstretched as they circle high over mountains and valleys on sun-warmed plumes of air. They fish in groups, commonly traveling 30 miles or more from their nesting colonies to chase carp and other fish in shallow lakes and wetlands. And they migrate in groups, fleeing the cold winters and the bitter winds of the interior prairie to congregate at the edge of the ocean from California and Mexico south to Nicaragua, or around the Gulf of Mexico from Yucatan to Florida.

None of this is out of the ordinary. It’s just the wonderful, striking yearly rhythm of our American white pelicans, these flamboyant fishers of inland marsh and ocean coast. But what is out of the ordinary is to find a pelican – this social bird of the Montana summer – somehow surviving an inland winter among the ice.

A winter surprise

That’s exactly what I saw on March 1, 2023. I was at Spokane Bay near Helena with photographers Lea Frye and Rachel Ritacco, looking for wildlife where spring-fed Spokane Creek empties into west-central Montana’s Hauser Lake.

“They don’t all read the books,” said Lea. 

She was referring to the American white pelican in front of us. The week before, a cold front had brought several days of frigid temperatures to Montana, with lows of -13°F. But there was no denying the existence of this bird, with its unmistakable, faded orange bill, here a month before any pelicans should have arrived.

The huge white bird glided smoothly across the small patch of open water at the inlet to the bay. Behind it, a solid barrier of ice spanned the inlet, moaning and grumbling in protest at the gradually-warming March weather. 

Why was this pelican here now? 

“Maybe he just has a really good food supply that we don’t know about,” Lea said.

On this relatively mild day, the local, year-round songbirds were heralding the approach of spring. Song sparrows sang cheerfully from the gray and tan cattails in the marsh. Townsend’s solitaires whistled and trilled exuberantly from the junipers on the reddish hills. We could hear the black-capped chickadees whistling their springtime fee-bee song.

A pelican in the cold

As we approached the area of the bay where the pelican was still swimming, an impressive flock of mallards leapt into the air, a thousand or more of them. Flashing their shimmery green heads and blue wing patches, they retreated to a more distant patch of water. But the pelican remained on the bay, swimming placidly. Was it injured?

We watched as the massive bird unfurled its broad, black-tipped wings and flapped, rising into low flight for about 50 yards before landing again near the mouth of the creek. If the pelican’s flight was impeded by an injury, it wasn’t evident to us.

Researching it later, I learned that the Spokane Bay pelican had been here for much of the winter. Grant Hokit had seen it on December 21, when the air temperature was -17°F. Fed by warm springs welling up from underground, the mouth of Spokane Creek was still open. With a probe, Grant determined that the water temperature six feet down was still a mild 47°F.

“The pelican was perched on a log on the west side of the mouth,” Grant wrote me. “It looked frigid with its head tucked under its wing. I wasn’t sure it was alive and didn’t want to disturb it but it did lift its head at one point. I couldn’t see any sign of injury but it was pretty inactive.”

American white pelicans in winter

A month later, Garrett Carlson saw the pelican again. It was still there in mid-February, near the open water where Grant had seen it on that frigid day in December. And now, at the beginning of March, the pelican remained. Whether it was starving or thriving was difficult to say – but it was clear that it had survived the worst of the cold season. In fact, this was the third winter in a row that local birders had found a lone pelican overwintering at Spokane Bay.

As unusual as this seemed at the time, it turns out that the Spokane Bay pelican isn’t the only one to overwinter like this in the frigid North American interior. To be sure, the vast majority of the estimated 450,000 American white pelicans on the continent migrate to warmer climates for the winter. But the Spokane Bay observations are not entirely isolated. In Montana, the occasional (mostly solitary) pelican has been seen off and on over recent winters at a handful of locations, including the Missouri River below Fort Peck Reservoir and Hauser Dam as well as Giant Springs State Park in Great Falls.

Winter fishing

What do these sites all have in common? They’re water bodies associated with springs, outflow from a dam, or some other condition that maintains open water through bitterly cold weather. If a fish-eating pelican is going to survive a mid-continent winter, this is clearly the sort of place it wants to be.

I talked with Scot Bealer, an avid angler who has worked as a fishing guide and a biologist, to learn more about how warm spots like these might affect winter fishing opportunities for pelicans.

“Springs are a thermal attractant to fish,” he told me. 

Patches of unseasonably warm water may support additional aquatic insects, drawing in trout, carp, and other species.

“In Colorado, I have seen fish absolutely stack up in places like that,” Scot continued.

And it’s not just in Montana that pelicans will sometimes overwinter in places like these. Shortly after I saw the early-March pelican at Spokane Bay, Alberta birder and photographer John Reasbeck got in touch with me. He told me that at southern Alberta’s Frank Lake, 280 miles northwest of Spokane Bay, an American white pelican with an injured right wing had stayed through much of the winter. In this case, a pipe that discharged treated wastewater into the lake was the source of the warmer-than-usual water. (Find more of that story on his blog.) In fact, it was the third winter in a row that a pelican with a wing injury – which John suspected was the same individual – had overwintered there.

Goodbye, Elsa

John named the pelican Elsa and visited her frequently through the winter. He watched her swimming, preening, and catching fish below the wastewater pipe. In January, in spite of her injury, Elsa began flying, exercising her massive wings as she flapped over the icy lake. Finally, on January 31, she flew away.

“She flew right by me at Frank Lake,” John wrote me. “Then she banked to the left and I never saw her again. I’ve been saying ‘her,’ but we don’t really know for sure. We do know that she is on the small side as compared with other pelicans. Males are usually larger. So, we’re guessing female. Besides, with Elsa having survived so many days with -30°C [-22°F] temperatures, it just seemed fitting to give her the name of the princess from Frozen.”

Surviving the cold

What is going on with these overwintering white pelicans? Several of the Montana birds, like Elsa in Alberta, have had wing injuries. A pelican that spent the winter of 2012-2013 at Giant Springs State Park, for example, had an injured left wing. Great Falls birder Beth Hill wrote me that she never saw this bird catch fish successfully. It seemed to get thinner and thinner and eventually disappeared, in the spring as the migrating pelicans were starting to return. Beth suspects this bird died. But there have also been others, such as this winter’s Spokane Bay bird, that seem to be capable fliers with no evidence of an injury.

Are all of these unusual, inland overwinterers just surviving, making the most of a brutal winter in the few patches of relatively warm water that might just allow them to make it? Are they pushing the limits of starvation, just barely getting to spring alive? Or are some of them thriving, maintaining good condition and saving themselves the effort of migrating?

Without actually capturing these overwintering birds and checking their condition, it’s hard to know for sure. But when I asked Allison Begley, Avian Conservation Biologist with Montana Fish, Wildlife, and Parks, for her thoughts on the pelican question, she had some intriguing suggestions. Allison pointed me towards the work of Colleen Moulton and her collaborators. These Idaho biologists took a careful look at decades of observations of pelican breeding populations across western North America – and they found some interesting trends.

Shifting northward?

From California to Montana, it turns out, the western population of American white pelicans has been shifting its breeding range northward since the 1970s. In part, it’s been a response to water shortages at previously-used breeding sites in California. The range shift also reflects the formation of new breeding colonies farther north, perhaps in response to the warming climate. Could the handful of pelicans overwintering in the north be related, a response to milder winters?

“I certainly think it’s interesting to speculate,” Allison told me.

Now, with the arrival of spring, the pelicans are returning. Moving northward from Mexico in groups, some of them ride thermals to an unbelievable 33,000 feet, where the air is frigid and airliners cruise by. Already they’re starting to show up again at the recently-thawed wetlands of the interior, hunting suckers and carp. Soon they’ll be raising another generation of young.

As the weather turns cold again this fall, will all of them leave? Will the intrepid handful of pelicans that spend the winter at Spokane Bay, Frank Lake, and other unfrozen sites increase over time? Keep your eyes open for winter pelicans – and let me know what you see. And in the years ahead, hopefully some more answers will emerge.

Further reading

Bird Conservancy of the Rockies. (n.d.). Avian Conservation Assessment database scores. Partners in Flight Databases. Retrieved from https://pif.birdconservancy.org/ACAD/Database.aspx

Davis, T. (2018, 1 August). The paths of pelicans. Utah Division of Wildlife Resources wildlife blog. Retrieved from https://wildlife.utah.gov/news/wildlife-blog/428-the-paths-of-pelicans.html

Knopf, F.L & Evans, R.M. (2020). American white pelican (Pelecanus erythrorhynchos), version 1.0. In Birds of the World (A.F. Poole, editor). Ithaca, NY: Cornell Lab of Ornithology. Retrieved from https://birdsoftheworld.org/bow/species/amwpel

Montana Natural Heritage Program. (n.d.). American white pelican – Pelecanus erythrorhynchos. Montana Field Guide. Retrieved from https://fieldguide.mt.gov/speciesDetail.aspx?elcode=ABNFC01010

Moulton, C.E., Roberts, S.B., Horne, J.S., & Wackenhut, M. (2018). Changes in abundance, productivity, and distribution of western American white pelicans (Pelecanus erythrorhynchos), 1981-2014. In Trends and traditions: avifaunal change in western North America. (W.D. Shuford, R.E. Gill Jr., & C.M. Handel, editors). Camarillo, CA: Western Field Ornithologists. pp. 258-268.