COMMENTS & CURIOSITIES:A pelican nicknamed ‘Crash’

Think you have it tough? Try being a pelican. If it’s not one thing, it’s another. As if being run over by boats isn’t enough, there’s fishing line, fishhooks, plastic bags, Styrofoam cups and worst of all, the idiots who are deliberately trying to hurt you or even kill you. It’s a jungle out there. Okay, it’s an ocean out there, which is like a jungle, only wetter.

I like pelicans. They’re pretty, in a goofy sort of way, and their bodies and giant beaks are engineering marvels. You know that big pile of rocks just off San Francisco where they used to send people who behaved badly? Of course you do. But do you know where the name Alcatraz comes from? From pelicans, that’s where.

In 1755, Spanish explorer Juan Manuel Ayala decided to check out the rocky island that presides over San Francisco Bay. When he got there, it was all pelicans all the time, as far as the eye could see. The Spanish word for pelican is “alcatraces” and Ayala named the island “Isla de los Alcatraces,” which was shortened to Alcatraz in later years, for which San Francisco tour guides are grateful.

There’s even a famous poem about pelicans by poet Dixon Lanier Merritt, although, befitting a bird as odd as the pelican, it’s usually attributed, wrongly, to Ogden Nash: “Oh, a wondrous bird is the pelican. His bill holds more than his belican. He can take in his beak enough food for a week, but I’m darned if I know how the helican.”

Pelicans have pretty strong opinions about humans, most of them not good. They do like the people at the Wetlands and Wildlife Care Center in Huntington Beach, though. The staff and volunteers at the Center rescue, rehabilitate, revive and restore all sorts of marine life.

Since June 22, they have nursed more than 70 pelicans that were injured or feeling poorly. The center was the only good thing to come out of the oil spill off the coast of Huntington Beach in February 1990 by the way, when the tanker American Trader spilled some 400,000 gallons of crude oil onto local beaches. Part of the settlement of that case was the establishment of a care center for marine wildlife.

On Thursday, workers from the Center carted 11 pelicans down to Corona del Mar State Beach, pointed to the water and said, “There you go, good luck, write if you get work.”

One of them was a female pelican that earned the nickname “Crash” one day last month and is lucky to be alive today. On June 22, Crash was flying around Laguna Beach doing all the things that pelicans do. Crash was on final approach on one flight and somehow mistook Pacific Coast Highway for the Pacific Ocean -- two nearby but very different things.

The impact between her beak and the windshield of a car is what earned Crash her nickname when she was delivered to the Wetlands and Wildlife Care Center.

Fortunately, the driver of the car was unhurt and Crash’s injuries were manageable, needing some stitches for her pouch and a pin for one of her feet, but she is darn proud of the fact that the windshield was a total loss.

What Crash couldn’t know was that her less-than-excellent adventure would travel around the world when the Associated Press picked up the story.

By the next morning, Crash was gulping headlines in newspapers and on radio and television outlets everywhere, from the Washington Post to CNN.

Is a pelican-meets-car story really that big a deal?

Only when it includes a pelican who is a little tipsy and Alfred Hitchcock, which this one did. As it turns out, the pelican-patchers at the Wildlife Care Center think they know exactly why Crash was lined up on the wrong runway in Laguna Beach. It’s called domoic acid poisoning. A major red tide, which we’ve had, produces a lot of algae in the water, which produces domoic acid. Fish gobble the domoic acid, pelicans gobble the fish and that makes them, well, drunk.

Crash wasn’t flying blind, she was flying drunk ... PFUI ... Pelican Flying Under the Influence ... which is totally illegal in this state.

Since early June, the Wetlands and Wildlife Care Center has received a number of reports of marine birds acting drunk and behaving erratically. Is this a first? It is not.

In 1961, Monterey and other towns on the Northern California coast were besieged by hundreds of marine birds flying into buildings, cars and people -- a strange episode that was the inspiration for Alfred Hitchcock’s 1963 thriller “The Birds” with Tippi Hedren.

At the time, no one could come up with a plausible explanation for the bad bird behavior because the domoic acid phenomenon wasn’t discovered until 1991, when a second case of birds-gone-wild hit Monterey.

But all’s well that ends wet. On Thursday, 10 pelicans plus Crash were transported to Corona del Mar from Huntington Beach in four SUVs, then carefully led to the water’s edge.

At this point, Crash just wants to put the whole thing behind her and is glad that her reputation was salvaged when the truth came out. And you can bet your bottom anchovy that Crash will never touch a drop of domoic acid again. I gotta go.

Peter Buffa is a former Costa Mesa mayor. His column runs every Sunday. He may be reached by e-mail at [email protected]