A pelican is not a winter bird!

American White Pelicans at Gardner Dam. Feathery black cap on bird in foreground indicates it is a chick-feeding adult. Fibrous plate on bill of top left bird is part of his breeding display. John Madsen photo

I know you're wondering what is going on here. It's January on the prairies. What's with this pelican picture? A pelican is not a winter bird. Okay, okay. The truth is that this blogging idea was putting the cart before the horse. The day I got this new-to-me IMac computer, my darling daughter Karen cleaned off the hard drive, put on the new program thingies and then asked what I wanted to do on this machine.

"I want to be able to edit the pictures off my camera and I want to write a blog," I said positively.

Now I have not even read anybody's blog and the only thing I know about blogs is from the movie Julie and Julia, a movie I loved. But before I could blink, Karen had me set up with this blog and had bookmarked it so I could find it again, and had downloaded a free program to handle the photos. And so I dived into this blogging business, heedless of the fact I didn't have enough photos. I wish I had photographed the gangly Hairy Woodpecker clinging to the tower feeder, spewing seeds left and right, or the Blue Jay filling his crop before flying off last week. I never bothered with the ravens or the magpies. The big flock of Snow Buntings I could see in the field just outside the town limits were too far away for my camera.

And so back to pelicans. My favorite close up view of a pelican was on Emma Lake from Bob and Clistine's pontoon barge boat that's like a floating sun deck. When we got close to a lone pelican paddling lazily near the shore, Clis cut the motor and we floated silently as the pelican drifted nearer. We could almost reach out and touch him. He looked like something left over from the Jurassic era. This impression is probably created by the scaly yellow skin that encircles the eye and stretches down to the bill To stare into that eye is almost like peering back through the tunnels of time and evolution. (And of course, I did not have my camera.)

Pelican landing at Tobin Lake. Photo by Clistine Fisher.

The pelican is huge bird with a nine-foot (2.8 m) wingspan, an enormously long yellow-orange bill, and is white with black on its wings. It doesn't dive but scoops up food in its pouch-like bill and strains out the water.

A flock of pelicans in flight is a fascinating aerial display as exciting as the famous Snowbirds at air shows. The first time we watched such a display was at Redberry Lake shortly after we came back to the prairies and were living at Delisle. There is a large colony of nesting pelicans established on an island in Redberry Lake. We watched seven pelicans flying in precise vee-formation in huge lazy circles. In perfect unison, they flapped their long black-tipped wings twice and then on cue, paused to glide, and then repeated this exactly in time as though they were watching an unseen conductor's baton or listening to music we could not hear

They hunched their heads back as they flew, making an S-curve of their neck, creating a place to prop up their long bills. They didn't seem to have any destination in mind that day at Redberry, but rather appeared to be just out for a spin. The passed so close overhead, we imagined we felt the air move with their wing beats, and continued so far they were almost specks as the completed the arc and began circling back toward us.

Someone told us that some of the pelicans seen fishing at the weir on the South Saskatchewan River in Saskatoon are probably non-breeding day visitors from the colony at Redberry Lake.

Watching them took me back more than 60+ years to when I was a child holidaying at Waskesui with my family. We were out on the Queen or the Shamrock, one of the tour boats that took visitors around the lake, when for the first time I watched this magnificent bird lifting powerfully into the air with the pouch under its bill distended and water spilling out the sides.

It's still thrilling today to watch pelicans. And to talk about them in January makes summer seem possible again.