Mary Martin (right) and Lisa Fischer hold a pelican to check it over for injuries as Diana O'Connor (seated) takes notes on the bird's condition. Twenty-one pelicans were kept at Red Oak Nursery after being rescued from rivers. REBECCA SELL/THE FREE LANCE-STAR View More Images from this story Visit the Photo Place

View the Westmoreland County community page

Pelicans head north rescuedbirds were saved from icy rivers

Pelicans rescued from icy Chesapeake Bay moved north for better sanctuary, more treatment

Date published: 2/22/2007

BY FRANK DELANO

Rescued from icy rivers two weeks ago, two dozen brown pelicans left their temporary refuge at a Westmoreland County greenhouse yesterday and headed north in a U-Haul truck.

Veterinarians and wildlife-rehabilitation experts were on hand in Frederick, Md., to examine the birds and send them on to other sanctuaries for additional treatment and recuperation.

"They need cages big enough to fly in and access to water in larger pools," said Wendy Fox, who was in Maryland coordinating the effort.

Fox is executive director of the Pelican Harbor Seabird Station Inc. in Miami, where the birds may eventually be released.

Wildlife rehabilitator Diana O'Connor of the Wild Bunch Wildlife Rehabilitation Refuge near Warsaw found the first two nearly frozen pelicans by the Rappahannock River at Tappahannock.

O'Connor alerted other friends of wildlife in southern Maryland, who found more distressed birds in the ice of the Potomac River and Chesapeake Bay. Many of them appeared to be suffering from hunger and from frostbite to their feet, she said.

All of the birds ended up at a heated greenhouse at Red Oak Nursery near Montross. To deter predators, nursery owners Gary and Janice Hutt circled the greenhouse with an electric fence and sprinkled human hair swept from the floor of a beauty salon.

Those measures, plus a steady diet of fish laced with antibiotics and an occasional shower from the greenhouse irrigation system, worked wonders.

"Getting an unhealthy bird out of a cage is one thing," Gary Hutt said yesterday. "But getting a healthy bird into a cage is quite another thing."

Hutt, his wife, Janice, and three employees corralled the birds, held their beaks shut, folded their wings, tucked their necks and gently stuffed the pelicans into large pet carriers lined with towels and cloth.

Dennis O'Connor showed up in a U-Haul truck with extra cages and 1,000 pounds of frozen herring donated by a Northumberland County seafood processor. A computer programmer for the city of Alexandria, O'Connor was subbing for his wife, Diana, who was at home near Colonial Beach recuperating from a broken shoulder.

Once rare visitors to the Chesapeake Bay region, pelicans have been nesting here since 1987 and increasing in numbers, bird experts say. "The wintering birds we have are mostly inexperienced juveniles, born in the previous breeding season. They can be thought of as 'testing the bounds' of northern wintering range--alas, with their own lives," said Ned Brinkley, editor of the journal North American Birds. "Global climate change is not an even process and so we'll see many such cases of mortality over decades to come," he said.

Follow us on

Date published: 2/22/2007