American White Pelican | Audubon Art Plate 311

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John James Audubon’s Journal Entry:

I feel great pleasure, good reader, in assuring you, that our White Pelican, which has hitherto been considered the same as that found in Europe, is quite different. In consequence of this discovery, I have honoured it with the name of my beloved country, over the mighty streams of which, may this splendid bird wander free and unmolested to the most distant times, as it has already done from the misty ages of unknown antiquity.

In Dr. RICHARDSON's Introduction to the second volume of the Fauna Boreali-Americana, we are informed, that the Pelecanus Onocrotalus (which is the bird now named P. Americanus) flies in dense flocks all the summer in the Fur Countries. At page 472, the same intrepid traveller says, that "Pelicans are numerous in the interior of the Fur Countries up to the sixty-first parallel; but they seldom come within two hundred miles of Hudson's Bay. They deposit their eggs usually on rocky islands, on the brink of cascades, where they can scarcely be approached; but they are otherwise by no means shy birds." My learned friend also speaks of the "long thin bony process seen on the upper mandible of the bill of this species;" and although neither he nor Mr. SWAINSON pointed out the actual differences otherwise existing between this and the European species, he states that no such appearance has been described as occurring on the bills of the White Pelicans of the old Continent.

When, somewhat more than thirty years ago, I first removed to Kentucky, Pelicans of this species were frequently seen by me on the sand-bars of the Ohio, and on the rock-bound waters of the rapids of that majestic river, situated, as you well know, between Louisville and Shippingport. Nay when, a few years afterwards, I established myself at Henderson, the White Pelicans were so abundant that I often killed several at a shot, on a well known sand-bar, which protects Canoe Creek Island. During those delightful days of my early manhood, how often have I watched them with delight! Methinks indeed, reader, those days have returned to me, as if to enable me the better once more to read the scattered notes contained in my often-searched journals.