The Texas Gulf Coast is along the migratory bird Central Flyway, so there are not only a lot of birds around here, but also a lot of different species of them and one of the most common (along with all kinds of egrets, herons, and ibises) are pelicans.

Pelicans are some of my favorite birds to photograph. They’re large, so it doesn’t take a huge telephoto to capture them effectively. They are less skittish than almost any other species, so you can often get fairly close to them. There are now a lot of them, which wasn’t the case forty years ago when their numbers had dropped so precariously low it was feared they would soon become extinct. Happily, with the banning of DDT and of hunting them, their numbers have increased so much they’ve been taken off the endangered list on the east coast. Pelicans also have some personality, unlike most other birds, and are often quite entertaining to watch. So, because of all this, I’m finding my camera often pointing in their direction.