On Wed, Jun 16, 2010 at 10:12:37PM -0400, John Sessoms wrote: > > Brown Pelicans were one of the "success stories" from the Endangered > Species Act. They'd made a comeback to the point of being removed from > "endangered" to "threatened". Many of the rescued birds are parents who > cannot get back to their nests. The chicks are going to starve. > > At least one whole generation is likely to be lost, and we may be > looking at an extinction level event.
That's hardly the case for the Brown Pelican as a whole. The Gulf Brown Pelican only reflects one subspecies (around 1/3 of the worldwide Brown Pelican population). Of those, 2/3 do live in the Gulf, and the oil spill is indeed a serious problem for them. But the situation is no worse that the problems caused by DDT, and that wasn't restricted to a small geographic area. A resettling program from unaffected areas (the Pacific or Atlantic coasts, and Peru - home to 2/3 of the world's Brown Pelicans) could handle the problem, as has already been shown once. It's definitely a serious problem, but extinction is unlikely. -- PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List [email protected] http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net to UNSUBSCRIBE from the PDML, please visit the link directly above and follow the directions.
