Brown pelicans hunting the nearshore waters

Stand at the water's edge near Montecito and watch the surface. The Pacific is flat and bright in mid-summer, and if you wait long enough, a brown pelican will fold its wings and drop. The bird hits the water at an angle, bill first, and the whole body follows into a brief explosion of white. A second later it bobs back up, tilts its head to drain the pouch, and swallows.

Brown pelicans are here in numbers right now, and what drives that is fish. After the breeding season ends on the Channel Islands, pelicans disperse along the coast in all directions, and the nearshore waters off Santa Barbara County are a reliable mid-summer feeding ground. The birds work in loose groups, sometimes in a line, sometimes scattered across a quarter mile of surface. When one dives, others nearby often follow, which is not coincidence. A diving pelican pushes fish downward, and the disturbance can compress a school from below while the surface birds hit from above. The fish that matter most here are northern anchovies and Pacific sardines, both small, oily, schooling species that move through shallow coastal water in dense aggregations. A single dive can yield several fish at once. The pelican's pouch holds roughly three times the volume of its stomach, so it can take a large haul, drain the water, and swallow the catch whole.

The relationship between pelicans and these schooling fish is not one the pelicans control entirely. Anchovy and sardine populations cycle with sea surface temperatures and upwelling patterns, and in years when those fish run thin, pelican condition drops noticeably. Breeding success on the islands tracks fish availability with a short lag. Right now, in mid-summer, upwelling along the California coast is pushing cold, nutrient-rich water toward the surface, and that supports the plankton that anchovies feed on, which in turn concentrates the anchovies in the nearshore zone where pelicans can reach them. The pelicans are, in a sense, reading the oceanography. They locate fish by sight, scanning the surface from several meters up, and they target schools near the top of the water column. Their plunge dive is shallow by seabird standards, rarely more than a meter below the surface, which means they depend on fish being up high, not running deep.

Heermann's gulls are almost always nearby when pelicans are actively feeding. These are not casual bystanders. The gulls land on the water close to a pelican that has just surfaced and attempt to steal fish directly from the pouch before the pelican can drain and swallow. The pelican typically turns away or raises its bill, but the harassment is persistent. Heermann's gulls breed almost entirely on a single island off Baja California, then disperse north along the Pacific coast in summer, arriving here in numbers at roughly the same time the pelicans are most actively foraging. The overlap is consistent enough that the two species are rarely seen far apart in this season.

Double-crested cormorants work the same waters but differently. They dive from the surface and pursue fish underwater, using their feet to drive them down to depths a pelican cannot reach. Where a pelican takes a single strike at a compressed school near the surface, a cormorant may chase a single fish for several seconds through the water column. Both strategies produce fish; they just access different parts of the same resource.

Look out now at whatever water is visible from where you are. If there are pelicans working, you may catch the pause before the dive, that brief stall in forward flight when the wings half-fold and the bird tips its bill toward the surface. The water below them is full of fish moving in directions you cannot see.