That's My Point - Donna Decker on Our Area

After the Hurricane:

Playpens of Pelicans on the Panhandle

“Chris needs a load of baby pelicans to get to Melbourne,” Jimi tells me from his cell phone.  It is the day after the worst hurricane the old timers can remember hit these Northwest Florida Panhandle shores.  Chris Beatty’s Florida Wild Mammal Association has taken in one hundred and nine orphaned and wounded pelicans from Carrabelle and Alligator Point beaches.  Several dozen are stranded babies.

The shack of a cottage where I live on Alligator Point still stands, although the main house to which it was connected took a hard beating.  I was on-my-knees grateful, and when I heard about the pelicans, I said, “Let’s go.”

The birds are overflowing Chris’s house and pelican pen and need to be placed in centers throughout the state.  Our mission is to take a group of seventeen to the Melbourne wildlife rehabilitation center.  So first we head to a car rental place in Tallahassee to pick-up a fifteen-passenger van.  Jimi drives it to Chris’s Crawfordville woods, while I drive my car.  We don’t get far up the Association’s road after bouncing on Edgar Poole’s rutted packed dirt, because several vehicles block the path.  Ten or so people, at least half of them teenagers, hurry to the backs of vehicles, scooping up bleeding and injured pelicans, carrying the birds through the trees to the pen. 

There isn’t time for pleasantries, although everyone is friendly. As soon as I get to the efficient operation, a young woman thrusts a baby pelly into my arms.  And that is it.  The bird is about eighteen inches high and covered in dense warm down instead of feathers.  It doesn’t resist as I hold it close to my chest, sinking into its comforting body.  Carrying the pelly, I follow the rescuers.  In the high-wooden fenced and wired pen, many of the pelicans are congregating in small groups, some with drooping wings.  Several rear back, their wings beating high when we open the gate.  Others walk on malleable webbed feet, exploring the pen and its cool-water pool

Putting down the baby pelican, I leave the pen and hustle up the path to Chris’s house through woods filled with bird hospitals, deer pens, otter pools.  When I get to the house, the usual crew of dogs runs up in welcome. Jimi and I need to get going to make the six-hour trip, drop off the vanload of pelicans and drive through the night back to Tallahassee. Typically, Chris’s living room will lodge at least several cages of healing birds, maybe owls or gulls.  This time, it is also filled with three playpens of several dozen-baby pelicans.  Most of them are sleeping, snuggled together in litters.

In Chris’s usual organized, yet low-key way, she is strategizing getting the pelicans to rehabilitation centers, with her teen-aged daughter’s help.  She gets me connected on the phone with the Melbourne clinic for directions, writes out checks for the gas and the van, instructs us about the birds’ medications, directs a house-full of volunteers, takes in other critters like raccoons, possums, and seagulls hurt by yesterday’s storm, chops up fish for pelicans, makes arrangements for the transport of additional pelicans to Miami, while making us all feel appreciated. 

There’s something about being with birds and animals in proximity like this.  Normally, we’d never get a chance, except in a zoo or aquarium or by hunting, to be this close to a wild animal.  And yes they are wild, “nature red in tooth in claw” as Tennyson says. However, I have recognized a rich palpable intelligence in the eyes of crows, deer, gulls, screech owls, hawks, otters, from my time rescuing birds and animals for Chris.

Although we all have our part and are working to organize and transport the birds, we are mesmerized by the playpens full of baby pelicans. “They’re each like their own portable space heater,” one of the rescuers tells us.  She goes on to say that their body temperatures are over one hundred degrees.  Since the July temperature hovers at ninety-five, she advises us to keep the air conditioning in the van high.  Jimi has quickly figured out how to unlatch each of the vans four seats and has already taken them into Chris’s house.  Volunteers set our seventeen pellies in twos and threes into large pet carriers, and we load the heavy, huddled cargo into the body of the van.  We’ve got directions, medications, and good wishes, then we’re off, first driving south, then east over to Melbourne.

As we drive down back roads to the turnpike, Jimi turns on the radio to a country station.  The pelicans are hushed for now in their contained carriers.  One softly coughs every half hour or so.  They sit close to each other and I am surprised at how easy it is for them to cluster so closely.

I’ve rescued a broken-winged pelican once in Ochlockonee Bay, but usually the closest I get to pelicans has been as they’re perched on the dock of the cottage where I live on Alligator Harbor.  As I watch them fishing on the bay or roosting on the dock through the large bay windows, they keep me company throughout the day.  Or I see them in the early evening, when I’m walking Lilly Belle next to the Gulf and they fly above in small groups or in long strings more than twenty.  I didn’t know until now how comforting they could be to one another.

Jimi and I have the air conditioning on high with the fan at maximum.  After a couple of hours, we are so cold that Jimi wraps a green flannel shirt around his shaved head, and I drape a blanket up to my neck as a shawl.  We soon realize that these pelicans, concentrated in the space of a fifteen-seater van, are ripe with the stink of fish.  Between the freezing cold and the heady sardine smell, Jimi and I look at each other and burst out laughing.

At a convenience store about halfway to Melbourne, we finally realize there’s a separate temperature control in the back.  We quickly adjust it to high and the front fan to a moderate level, and begin to thaw.  A few of the pelicans snuffle as we barrel down the turnpike.  Old hard rock replaces new country on the radio, and I scream, “Gonna give ya every inch of my love!” Singing at the top of my lungs as we barrel down the turnpike with our quiet avian load, releases some of the fear and grief that’s been with me since Sunday, after Hurricane Dennis left its mark.  

Now images of the last few days come to the surface.  I see Highway 98 and Surf Road flooded with three feet of water where the bay waters meet overflowing marshlands. I’m climbing over Alligator Drive, starting to hike the three plus miles under a full July sun, to see if my cottage still stands. 

Then the pelican in the back coughs, and I’m back in the fishy van with the birds as we push toward the Atlantic to the clinic. About an hour from the hospital, the pelicans begin to rustle and one loudly squawks, having been cooped up now for several hours.  I turn to the three birds in the carrier closest to me and wish I could tell them we’re nearly there. They are nestled into each other; their brown eyes open and large. They watch me warily and are so close together it’s hard to see where one wooly pelly ends and the other begins. Later, when I show a friend a photo of the gray nuzzled birds, she’ll say that they look like a plate of pasta. At around six p.m., we spot the exit, and turn onto a coastal highway to the small neat building that houses the Melbourne center.

The crew of fifteen clinic workers and volunteers waits for us.  In the last twenty-four hours, the director and staff have built an outdoor pelican pen out of fish nets to shelter these birds.  We all quickly begin a caravan and hoist the heavy pet cages from the van to the pen, open the wired doors and coax the pellies out.  Each wobbly bird heads for the farthest corner of the pen where they herd together in one large group, corralling against the net.  A few of the braver pellies widely brandish their beaks and screech at our clumsy attempts to give them food and water.

The clinic director wonderfully strips all the soiled sheets that cover the bottoms of the carriers and her staff replaces them with clean linens.  She offers to hose down the cages and gives us a bottle of a powerful deodorizer she gets at Sam’s Club, which she says will wipe away the fish stink permeating the van.  We all take a minute to watch the baby pellies start to cautiously move out and walk around the netted pen, stretching their wings, getting bolder. Then we say our goodbyes and thanks and jump in the van for the drive home.

After stopping to eat dinner at a small place on a bay, we quietly drive through the night and arrive at Chris’s as the sun glows orange above the horizon. Trying to make deadline to get the van back, Jimi quickly puts back the seats, while Chris cleans pelican droppings off the floor.  We check on the remaining sleeping pellies, marvel again at their downy beauty, then drive the fifty miles to Tallahassee.  We drop off the van, which amazingly smells of citrus.  No trace of our bountiful load of fishy baby pelicans.  Then I see some downy tufts on the carpet, and think of how they snuggled so closely, finding solace in the most unlikely of places, in playpens after a hurricane. 

After the Hurricanes:  Pure and Simple

At the tail end of this 2005 hurricane season, it thankfully looks like Gamma is going to miss us.  Hurricane Dennis did not whip us on July tenth, like Katrina did Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama. Looking back on this life-changing storm season, I remember the days following Dennis.

Baby pelicans, dozens of them, stranded on our beaches after the storm, were sleeping in playpens.  Covered with more down than feathers, they were as soft and warm as lamb’s wool.  Awake, they walked like little Groucho’s, trying out their beaks and squawks.  After Hurricane Dennis’ harsh insistence on that Sunday, my land-locked Minnesotan friend whose worries about the weather lean to blizzards and frostbite said to me, “You’ll find your joys, pure and simple.”

I cradled these pure and simple joys after taking in the rubble of our houses, docks, store and road.  On Monday, leaving my car to the east of South Shoals, the old KOA site, I began to moonwalk to my house across the divide of broken road under a full July sun.  On the west side of the Point, the joyful generosity of strangers and friends whisked me into a wild variety of transportation, first Don’s and Fred’s trucks and the back of Connie and Dini’s pick-up.  Then I clambered onto Bob and Andrew’s tractor, bounced on Ty’s anti-gravity golf cart, and sunk into Larry’s Lincoln Navigator.  Lastly, I dangled inelegantly off Mr. Joe’s dock, then plunked into his boat like an inept Tarzan.  As we rushed east into the spray, I felt like shouting to the sky and sun for my pure and simple joy.  

A cormorant at the shoreline swept its wing, while slowly pirouetting in a two-thirds circle, then suddenly stopped and snatched its fish.  Off a dock piling, blue crabs pinched, then popped barnacles into their mouths.  Two swallow-tailed kites, a rare sight in these skies, rode the airwaves, their split-tails silhouetted against the clear blue.

After these hurricanes remind us again and again of the indiscriminate power of wind and of water, I take my basic joys.  They arrive day in and day out on this spit of land between the gulf and the harbor, bordered by pine forest, immersed in the wild.  Finely aware of nature, we who live on or visit Alligator and Bald Points know that, whether storm surge or tornados, rattlers or sharks, high skinny pines or sinkholes, this is a land radiating with beauty and muscle.  A land that sometimes shouts that it is in charge. A land that I am grateful every day to call home. 

Donna Decker

2005