Technically speaking, it is a bird band. Licensed ornithologists are allowed to place very small, lightweight aluminum bands around the legs of birds in an attempt to determine where they migrate. Its value to me lies in the fact that by recovering this ring, I was able to contribute a tiny pixel in an image that is still emerging.  

   When I found the ring, it was still firmly wrapped around the right leg of a large dead American White Pelican.  Only one tenth of one percent of the birds that get banded are ever recovered, so I contacted the Bird Banding Laboratory at the Patuxent Wildlife Research Center in Maryland about my find and gave them number on the band.  A few weeks later I received a certificate in the mail telling me the story of the pelican that I had found dead.

    As it turned out, the bird had been banded in June shortly after hatching in Minnesota.  In August, when I found it, it was only two months old, yet had flown 1000 miles due south, only to die and be eaten by fire ants in northeast Texas.  It is an incredible story.  While we still know very little about that bird, the history of this single individual is now chartable on a map. We have a beginning point, and an ending point.   Although it might not reveal how and why this fully grown bird—though only two months old—was able to fledge and migrate so far so south so quickly, we have data to reveal that it did.  Why did the bird leave Minnesota in August, well before the arrival of cold weather?  What drew the bird to Texas in August, when the temperature is still in triple digits?

    I do not have the answers to these questions.  But one of the reasons that birds are worth watching is because they force us to ask questions and to look for answers to those questions.  If nothing else, they fill our idle thoughts with wonder and spark our imagination about birds that can leap frog continents and jump thousands of miles in a single bound.  Although I digress, these are things that for me make life worth living. 

   Perhaps that pelican headed to our corner of the state because of our reservoirs. Pelicans eat small fish, and so it stands to reason that they would hang out near water.  One hundred years ago, the sighting of pelican was thought to be quite noteworthy (because there were no large man-made lakes to attract them).  Many people think of pelicans as primarily inhabiting coastal areas, yet American White Pelicans are regular visitors to the lakes and reservoirs in our corner of the state; they do not breed here.  A few, however, do remain during the summer.  Brown Pelicans, on the other hand are mostly coastal birds, but have wandered to a few of our lakes as well.  Either way, these huge birds have a wingspan of nearly ten feet and are show stoppers when they arrive.  To call them entertaining would be an understatement.