Features

MALIBU — Southern California’s brown pelicans are returning to swoop and dive along the coast as the population bounces back from declines caused by El Nino. 

“We were talking about it last week as big flocks of them were going by,” said Lorry Haddock, a Malibu lifeguard.  

“It just seems that, progressively, the numbers keep growing each year a little more.” 

The warm currents created by El Nino kept the pelicans’ food away, but La Nina caused cold water to rise from the depths of the Pacific, bringing prey closer to the surface, biologists said.  

The past two years of such favorable weather in California and nesting areas in Mexico have greatly boosted the birds’ numbers. 

“During the last El Nino, there was almost no nesting in the Gulf of California,” Daniel Anderson, a professor of wildlife biology at the University of California, Davis, told the Los Angeles Daily News.  

“We had a big year down there this summer.” 

The famous pelican population on Anacapa Island off the Ventura coast has also made a comeback, according to a recent count.  

For many, the pelicans there and elsewhere in the area are a symbol of the early environmental movement because they were nearly wiped out 30 years ago by the pesticide DDT before the population crept back in subsequent decades. 

Frank Gress, a research biologist who, with Anderson, helped discover that the shells on Anacapa pelicans’ eggs were fatally thin because of DDT, recently made his 22nd annual census there. 

From Oct. 3 to Oct. 10 Gress counted nests, chick mortality, abandonment and productivity of each nest in the island rookeries.  

He has yet to finalize his results, but said he counted roughly 4,500 nests, about 2,000 more than in 1998. 

During 1992, one of three earlier El Nino years, he counted only 1,500 nests.