A waterbird with a distinctive pouch under its beak, it can grow to have a wingspan of three metres. Pelicans are social birds, nesting and often hunting in groups – they are monogamous during the breeding season but afterwards move on to find a new mate.
The strange behaviour and idiosyncratic appearance of pelicans have fascinated and beguiled man through the centuries. To the Seri, an indigenous group of people living in the Mexican state of Sonora, the pelican represented the creator of the world: a god who raised the land from beneath the waters that once covered all the earth. Not only was this pelican revered as their creator but, additionally, it was credited with the possession of a beautiful singing voice. This seems, it has to be said, a rather strange belief, given that the bird’s ‘song’ consists mainly of a series of croaks and grunts.
In Europe in the Middle Ages, the pelican had the reputation for being a truly pious bird and so became a symbol of Jesus, associated particularly with the Eucharist and the Passion of Christ. This connection arose because it was widely believed that the pelican possessed a special ability to restore its offspring to life by feeding them with its own blood, echoing Jesus’s words at the Last Supper, ‘this is my blood of the new testament, which is shed for many for the remission of sins.’ The fourth-century scholar Jerome, for instance, states, ‘As the pelican’s young killed by serpents were revived by their mother’s blood, so was the salvation by Christ towards those dead in sin.’ This ability to revive its young is, however, only part of the story, even though it’s the best-known part. Originally, it was thought that the reason the young died in the first place was because the male pelican, irritated at the sight of his growing brood, actually took it upon himself to kill them. Overcome by remorse, he then gave them his own blood to revive them. This may seem a rather strange idea, but it’s almost certainly based on first-hand observation, though it is a case of misinterpreted observation. Parent pelicans feed their young macerated food from the large pouch under their bill. Early observers clearly thought that it was blood that was being transferred.
Not even faulty observation can quite explain Aristotle’s extraordinary description of the pelican’s method of feeding:
Pelicans living by rivers swallow big smooth shells. After cooking them in its pouch in front of its stomach they vomit them up, so that when they are open they can pick out the flesh and eat it.
Dionysius of Halicarnassus, writing in the first century BC, also had some very strange theories about the bird’s feeding habits. Like Aristotle, he, too, believed in the cooked shellfish story, but he also added:
They have very long necks and are as voracious as shearwaters … They do not dive completely under the water but dip their necks, which are six feet long; keeping their body above the water, they take every fish that they find. In front they have a kind of pouch into which they put all their food, refraining neither from cockles or hard mussels, but gulping everything down, shell and all. When the creatures are dead they vomit up the mouthful, eat the flesh and expel the shells.
Finally, a peculiar story, recorded by Horapollo in the fourth century AD, tells how people set about capturing pelicans:
Although the pelican is capable of laying its eggs in quite inaccessible places it does nothing of the kind. Instead it digs a hole in the ground and deposits its offspring in it. Seeing what the bird is up to the catchers surround the spot with dried ox dung and set fire to it. When the pelican sees the smoke its great efforts to extinguish the fire by flapping its wings only make the fire worse and it sets fire to itself by mistake.