brown pelicans

Brown pelicans, long-necked egrets, flamingo-like roseate spoonbills and squawking seagulls fly lazily around a Texas Gulf Coast island.

Hundreds of brown pelicans are doing what they always do on Cat Island in the spring: wheeling above the mangroves, nesting and jostling for space on this noisy rookery a few miles off the Louisiana coast.

More than three dozen brown pelicans were cleared for takeoff Sunday when they were released along the Texas Gulf Coast after rehabilitation from a soaking in oil from the BP spill.

Inside a warehouse-turned-refugee encampment for animals soaked with oil, rescue teams wash acrid goo from the matted feathers of brown pelicans and other seabirds and try to nurse them to health.

The morning after President Barack Obamaa s visit to Grand Isle, a wildlife rescue boat slipped past an orange boom at nearby Queen Bess Island, home to thousands of rare brown pelicans and now under attack from a oil spill.

For more than a decade, the hundreds of brown pelicans that nested among the mangrove shrubs on Queen Bess Island west of here were living proof that a species brought to the edge of extinction could come back and thrive.

They are the ghastly images of a summer fouled before it started. Squawking seagulls and majestic brown pelicans coated in oil.

California brown pelicans have recently been dying in large numbers for reasons wildlife officials don't yet fully understand.