HOLLAND & ADAM ISLANDs, Dorchester County, MD, Friday, September 7, 2012.
Thanks to Dave Brinker, John Weske, and Carol McCollough I got wind of doings on Holland and Adam islands last Friday (any mistakes below are my doing). This was a pelican banding foray and late in the year for so many young to be encountered and banded. Dave said that 7 persons banded 79 pelican chicks on Adam Island (all that were there; this is a new colony) and 230 just to the S on Holland Island�s S segment (perhaps the majority of the remaining unbandeds that were there) = a grand total of 309.
The young were large so banding that many was a workout, especially since 2 of the people (Cindy Driscoll and an associate) were primarily concerned with taking samples to be tested for West Nile Virus and Avian Flu, leaving only John and Dave Brinker as banders and Carol and 2 others as bird wranglers.
John found no nests still with eggs and just one nest that held 2 young too small to band (c. 2 weeks old). He said �plenty� remained that were not banded due to time constraints. John says there were still loads of Double-crested Cormorants up in their tree nests on Holland I. These folks left the islands c. 1 P.M.
Dave and John�s records of total MD bandings now include 802 chicks and 9 adults on Holland Island, 85 chicks and 3 adults on Adam Island, and in Chincoteague Bay 26 chicks at the Big Bay Marsh colony. The latter held 122 nests in June. It was a total failure, probably due to predation.
Carol saw a Red-shouldered Hawk as she was both coming and going on maple Dam Road just below Key Wallace Drive. She saw a Snapping Turtle and a Diamondback Terrapin on the roads down to Crocheron plus 3 unID�d turtles (not Box Turtles), but since she was running late she couldn�t stop or slow to diagnose them all.
Carol saw 2 imm. Black-crowned Night Herons on Adam I. but said other herons were almost non-existent, had left their colonies for the year. Terns were scarce, too, with one Royal Tern seen on the way out to the islands. No landbirds were reported, in keeping with the rather bleak situation on the islands during September, in my limited experience (except if a cold front brings in passerine migrants).
An adult pelican captured on Sept. 7 had been banded as a chick on June 29, 2010, at South Point Marsh, VA, just S of Smith I., MD.
My thanks to Dave, John, and Carol for sharing these observations. I bailed at the last minute, having too much to do here since I�ll be away much of the rest of the year.
QUO VADIS PELECANUS OCCIDENTALIS? Where goist thou indeed? Now that thousands of pelican chicks have fledged over the past 15 or so years from the central Chesapeake Bay islands plus many hundreds more from Fisherman Island N.W.R. at the mouth of the Bay, one wonders where they will all breed. The 913� banded in MD this year are impressive but actually much lower than in some years. Still, the presence of over 500 pairs in the central Chesapeake in Maryland is a lot of birds.
When all these chicks reach breeding age, and many have already, they�ll not be just sitting around painting their toe nails. They�ll be hot to trot. The question is: where will they trot? Where and when will the anticipated hundreds of New Housing Starts take place?
Many seemingly suitable breeding sites remain unexploited by the pelicans. You�d think they would finally start colonies in New Jersey. But in some respects they exhibit a strange, limited distribution.
For instance, from our shoreline at Lucy Point, with its superb vantage point overlooking dozens of square miles of water at the Choptank River mouth, I have scanned thousands of times over the years and only seen pelicans twice, and on a day of exceptional visibility the pound net stakes they sometimes favor S of Black Walnut Point are clearly visible through a scope.
Often the species is barely detectable, even with a scope, from Hooper�s Island, even though Holland and Adam islands are only a few miles S of there.
Banding returns have shown that some of the breeding birds in the central Bay hatched as chicks in North Carolina. We don�t know about the pelicans from Fisherman Island because banding has never been done there. For several years BRPE has been absent as a breeder on Fisherman I. It seems to me there should be, after all these years of successful fledging, more nests than are being detected.
Perhaps there is a recession going on. As with some other species that have dramatically expanded their ranges in my lifetime � such as Glossy Ibis, Cattle Egret, and House Finch � the pelicans may be retrenching. Who knows what the pelicans will be doing next year?
Best to all. � Harry Armistead, Philadelphia.
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