Interesting but I promise any enquiry by
Tim the Yowie Man or anyone else in the Canberra Times
and me is pure coincidence.
From: Mark Clayton [
Sent: Saturday, 19 January, 2019 7:15 PM
To:
Subject: Re: [canberrabirds] Pelicans perching on poles
I believe that several weeks ago Tim the Yowie Man (at least I think it was him) writing in his weekly column in the Canberra Times asked for photographs of Australian Pelicans sitting on poles in the water after someone sent him a photo of several individual
s birds sitting on poles down on the South Coast - he was after the greatest number of pole sitters in one photo. I am not sure how many photos he received. This is slightly different to what Philip is talking about but is similar in vain.
Mark
On 19/01/2019 6:25 pm, Philip Veerman wrote:
I went to Batemans Bay this week (NSW SE coast, down from Canberra, for those not local). A thing that I noticed and usually have noticed there, is that the Pelicans really like to perch on light poles there. It seems to me a difficult
and strange thing for such heavy birds to do. They can hardly be looking for food from there. Given that even birds like Galahs sometimes have difficulty perching on these rounded smooth steel structures and Pelicans don’t have gripping feet and they would
need to achieve almost zero speed in flight to perch there. So is that a local habit or widespread? At San Remo near Phillip Island, there is a bit of a tourist attraction of feeding of Pelicans, but they fly in to the car park area, I did not notice them
perching on poles. Surprisingly a web search typing in “Pelicans perching on poles” provided many pictures
https://www.google.com/search?q=pelicans+perching+on+poles&rlz=1C1GGRV_enAU751AU751&tbm=isch&tbo=u&source=univ&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwizxozjivnfAhXUTX0KHe3BAdQQsAR6BAgAEAE&biw=1280&bih=882
but these are mostly stumps or piers not high light poles. Many are Australian Pelicans and the American Brown Pelicans which I suspect is not so big.
Philip
