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38 lasts till August and September when the young are able to care for themselves. In June and July when we visited the colonies, the young were able to walk and swim about, but the wing feathers had not yet developed flying strength, for the birds were still in the downy stage.

It takes about a month for the pelican to hatch its eggs, and the baby pelican is naked, helpless and ugly, and has to be shielded from the sun by its mother. Its ugliness increases with age till the youngster is covered with white down. The young birds stick close to the nesting site where they are fed by the parents, until, when about six weeks old, they begin to run about and mingle with the other young birds.

half-grown young pelican with wing quills partly grown, but body yet covered with down

It would be difficult to tell how an old pelican can recognize her own, but she seems to do it, for nesting is not a communal matter. As soon as an old bird alighted in the rookery, she was besieged by half a dozen young ones, but I never saw one of the parents feed till she had apparently made some selection as to the young.

The half grown pelicans stood around with their mouths open, panting like a lot of dogs after the chase on a hot day, their pouches shaken at every breath. When we went near one of the colonies, the youngsters went tottering off on their big webbed feet with wings dragging on this side and that as if they were poorly handled crutches. The first thing they did when we approached was to vomit up fish and then stagger on with the crowd. Following along after a band of young pelicans was as bad as crossing a battlefield where the victims were fish, for the carcasses were strewn all along in the wake of the procession. The youngsters huddled together by hundreds in a small space. Those on the outside pushed and climbed to get nearer the center, till it looked worse than any football scrimmage I ever saw. I watched one large bird rush for the center, bucking over three or four others and finally landing astraddle the neck of another. When we went nearer, those on the outside began to circle the ends and around and around the whole mass revolved as it moved off. Soon after the little gluttons retraced their steps to pick up the fish dinners that had been left behind.

One might wonder how such a huge-billed bird could feed a helpless young