The Brown Pelican, (Part 1, Excerpt 23)
In this new story, a Brown Pelican talks about the history of the Florida Keys and how the Brown Pelican was there when it all happened.
The Brown Pelican
Here I am, on my favorite dockside perch. You know it is just off Key West’s Mallory docks, the old town’s center of activity. I love to fly over here early in the morning. It is so invigorating. I fly low, skimming along the crests of the waves. I’m using a scientific term called “ground effect,” whereby as the air compresses between me and the water, it increases lift and easily supports me. That way I use very little energy. It is one of my favorite pastimes.
I nest every evening on a small uninhabited (at least by humans) mangrove island. It is located between the mainland and this fantastic chain of Keys. There is a small colony of us brown pelicans located there. We just love it because it’s so quiet and peaceful. But you should see it in breeding season, and when we raise our young. One can hardly move!
Wait! What is going on? That young man coming up the dock is a tourist, I suspect. What is he up to? Let’s see, he has a two-wheel contraption, they call it a bicycle. Now he is taking some materials out of the front basket. It looks like he is going to sketch me. Why, he must be an artist.
He has brushes and tubes of color. It looks like I’m going to be a watercolor painting! I will hold this pose. Look, he is finished and packing up already. That didn’t take long. I guess watercolor is a fast process, nothing like the time it takes for the oil colorists to paint. There he goes, pedaling his transportation.
Humans just don’t have the capabilities we have. In fact, he has my image, but he doesn’t know my soul. He doesn’t know the great and dynamic history of the brown pelicans. I would like to enlighten you. Come along and I’ll show you our environment, our home, our destiny.
I would like to start by taking you up. Let’s use the thermals to soar. Let’s take the Atlantic side of this string of keys running east northeast to south-southwest. Let’s go up...up...up. There, I am leveling off at six thousand feet, even though some of my peers have gone up as high as ten thousand feet!
If you look closer you can see the chain of shallow coral reefs running parallel to this arc. They are just under the beautiful turquoise water and occasionally rise slightly above. On the outside of the reef is the famous Gulf Stream and on the inside is the narrow Hawk Channel.
The Hawk Channel washes against the many coconut-studded sand beaches and mangrove shores. Both the Hawk Channel and the Gulf Stream are water highways, with treacherous reefs separating them. These reefs just sit there waiting a misstep by an unsuspecting ship.
This majestic environment is much over one hundred and fifty miles long. We consider it ours! We, brown pelicans traverse its entire length. It is our environment. Now we are one of the only two species of pelicans that reside in the United States. In the winter, one may see an occasional white pelican here, but their primary breeding ground is in western Canada and the northwestern US.
Even though I hate to admit it, the white pelican is much larger than us browns. They have a wingspan of up to nine and one half feet, where ours is six. They don’t feed as spectacularly as we do. They float, and scoop up fish and we, well I’ll show you, dive for our fish.
Let’s drop on down, soar some, and then drop down again. I can spot a fish from as high as sixty-five feet, but I like to be closer to the ocean. I glide above the crest of a wave, not even flapping a wing. When I spot a fish I dive straight in, leaning to the left to protect my throat from the impact. Then I open my pouch to let in the fish. I may also get a couple of gallons of water which I drain out as I float there. Then I just swallow the fish whole. Mm...Mmm, Good!
Oh, did I tell you about floating? I’m very buoyant. I float easily because I have air sacks in both my skin and bones. I can also swim very proficiently. Well, enough about me. As I may have mentioned, we brown pelicans have been here in the Keys from the beginning of time. As everyone knows, God made us, and Adam named us.
Let’s now go back in time, many years ago. Imagine a sparkling sand beach somewhere along this island chain. A dugout canoe, a boat made from a hollowed out log, is turning inward from the Hawk Channel. It is being paddled by three male natives. There are also two female passengers riding in it. They have come down in the Hawk Channel from the southeast Florida mainland. The waves carry them in towards the beach. They stop paddling and rest as they steady the canoe with their paddles. Suddenly a large wave picks them up, and they ride it up onto the sand. The three men drop their paddles in the boat, and jump out. The next wave pushes the boat farther up on the beach. The two women get out, with the help of the next wave they all pull the canoe up as far as they can.
The two older men take their weapons, one a spear and the other a bow with arrows, and head up into the vegetation. The remaining young man watches as the two women walk along the shore with a basket. They are gathering particular sizes and shapes of colored shells. These may be used for decorations, for tools to cut and clean the skins of animals, or even the end of a hoe for planting maize.
It seems the two men are the mates of the women and the third man watching over the women is the son of one. Their brown bodies glisten in the sunlight.
Suddenly the two men emerge from the tree line. Believe it or not, there are some very large mahogany trees growing on this key. They signal, and the two women put their woven basket of shells in the canoe. Each takes a bundle of items, and all three head towards where the two men had appeared.
On the inside of the mahogany forest, in a sizable clearing, is a mound. It is about fifty feet in diameter and three to four feet high. In fact, there are many more such mounds scattered through these Keys. They are either shell middens* burial mounds, or ceremonial locations. The Indians have been visiting, camping, and living in these Keys since two hundred years after the birth of Christ.
How do I know all this? Because we were there; in fact, we were there much earlier than the Indians.
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