Penny Beaver with a pelican. Photo: Penny Beaver.
Are they residentiary? Or migratory? How much time do they spend foraging for food themselves, compared to taking handouts of fish and chips at picnic tables or scavenging for scraps at boat ramps?
And while we’re on it, why don’t you ever see their babies?
Penny Beaver is hoping to find out the answers to all these lingering questions about pelicans and more.
The Associate Research Fellow in Seabird Ecology at Deakin University – and long-time Bega Valley resident – has won grant funding to study one of the South Coast’s most prolific – but least researched – birds.
“There is very little published data on this species and there could be a number of reasons,” she says.
“There’s lack of funding, and it could be catching them as well … It’s not always straight forward or easy. I mean, they’ve got a tip on the end of their bill, a little like a nail, but once you’re in their space, they can’t hurt you.
“When you hold a pelican, they feel like bubble wrap – they have air pockets all over their body which allows to them fly and soar.”
The fascination started in 2009 when she rescued a southern giant petrel in Horseshoe Bay, which, unfortunately, later had to be euthanised due to its injuries.
“That sparked my passion for sea and shore birds,” she says.
“They’re just extraordinarily beautiful birds. They’re so large, yet so elegant in the air. And I love the way they pose and look at you. And the little mohawk feathers on the back of their head. They all have different personalities, too.”
Pelican colony on Lake Brewster, NSW. Photo: Mal Carnegie, Lake Cowal Foundation, Birdlife Australia.
Not-for-profit conservation organisation Birdlife Australia is conducting research at a major pelican breeding site at Lake Brewster, part of the Murray-Darling Basin in central western NSW, where nest numbers can rise to several thousand during bouts of wet weather. Research is also happening at Port Phillip in Victoria, and the NSW Government has it’s own project going on at Narran Lake, tracking nearly 400 birds.
But for now, Ms Beaver is the only one focused on NSW’s South Coast.
It took her about six months to gain the necessary licences to catch and attach tracking devices to the birds, with the project kicking off in earnest in April this year. Once a pelican is caught, the GPS device is attached, measurements are taken, and a coloured orange and white leg band attached to differentiate them from birds involved in the other projects. All up, she’s tracking 11 birds at various spots along the coastline.
“We’ll analyse the GPS data to better understand their foraging behaviour … if there’s a certain age group or sex or time of year when they’re spending more time around boat ramps, versus naturally foraging, or if there are certain individuals who specialise in foraging or taking handouts,” she explains.
“So really, I’m trying to unravel just a small part of their secret lives.”
An example of Penny’s pelican tags (orange and white). Photo: Penny Beaver.
She is also involved in a citizen-science project called ‘Pelicount’ twice a year, where people are encouraged to report sightings of pelicans to provide an estimate of their numbers.
“We had our first Pelicount in July, and that’ll happen hopefully twice each year going forward.”
Some things are known, such as the fact that pelicans have fairly lengthy lives, ranging from 15 to 30 years. And while they can’t sustain long periods of flying, they can remain in the air for 24 hours and travel hundreds of kilometres. They’re social birds too, feeding together in groups of anywhere between 10 and 1900 – the largest ever recorded in Australia.
They can be nasty too – during periods of starvation, pelicans have been reported to capture and eat seagulls and ducklings by first holding them underwater to drown them and then consuming them headfirst.
Pelicans don’t breed every year, but rather only every few years, typically in large, sheltered inland bodies of water like Lake Brewster. Of the two to three eggs laid in each litter, normally only the largest and strongest chick will survive – by attacking and killing the others over food.
It turns out 2025 is the perfect year to find out more about pelicans.
“At the moment, there’s a large breeding event occurring across several inland wetlands and waterways, with the last one in 2022-23, when there was one of the largest breeding events ever, when the inland wetlands and waterways were filled with water,” Ms Beaver says.
The tracking devices she’s using might be more affordable than the circa-$2000 GPS units, but they “aren’t ideal, as they require data to be downloaded to a mobile device, and within a certain range”. They’re among the reasons she’s now appealing to the public for help to find at least one of her tracked pelicans, numbers 005 and 006 (she’s yet to recruit an 007).
Pelican 005 has gone missing around the Bermagui area. Photo: Penny Beaver.
She’s even taken to local noticeboards with a playful “Pelican wanted” poster, with the crime being “leaving mid-mission” and under “fishy circumstances”.
So far, findings reveal there are “definitely” some long-term resident pelicans along the South Coast, even if others only fly in for a short time before disappearing.
“But whether they go north, south, or what, I’m still working this out.”
Local birds are coming to know her.
“If I catch one from the location too often and don’t leave enough time in between each catch, they get quite wary of me, to the point that when we first deployed the devices, and caught about five or six over a few days, they would see my car and fly away. There’s definitely some recognition.”
People who come across Pelican 005 or 006, last seen around the Bermagui-Narooma area, are asked to report it via email to Ms Beaver at pelicancormorant@outlook.com.
