June 28, 2004
Missing: The Pelican Brief

By Steve Friess

How do you lose 30,000 birds? Aviary experts at the Chase Lake National Wildlife Refuge in central North Dakota don't know. But the continent's largest breeding ground for American white pelicans is virtually vacant. The birds returned this spring in their usual droves to the refuge about 60 miles east of Bismarck from their winter home on the Gulf of Mexico.

They even began a normal mating season, as evidenced by scores of abandoned chicks and never-to-hatch eggs. Now they've disappeared, and there's no littering of carcasses to suggest disease outbreak or predator decimation. Chase Lake contains a normal level of fish and reptiles, so there apparently isn't a problem with the food supply, says wildlife refuge project leader Kim Hanson.

Human causes have been largely ruled out; the area's been off-limits to hunters and most tourists since Teddy Roosevelt made it a refuge in 1908. Hanson says, "this may just be a natural correction, nature's way of dispersing them." That's a loss for a refuge that offered—as its Web site once, but no longer, declares—"pelicans, pelicans and more pelicans."

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