Species Spotlight: Spot-billed Pelican

Had I been born much earlier, I might have seen a Spot-billed Pelican in Shanghai. Apparently, a female was sighted on March 24, 1931. Thirty years later, in 1963, the last specimen was recorded in China. However, since then, the distribution of the species has been much reduced (source). It is now breeding mainly in India, Sri Lanka, and Cambodia (source: HBW).

This range reduction is also indicated by its scientific name Pelecanus philippensis (as the species can no longer be found in the Philippines) …

… and its classification as Near Threatened.

One paper provides an ethogram of the Spot-billed Pelican (and I am afraid I had to look up what an ethogram is: “An ethogram is a catalog or inventory of all the distinct behaviors exhibited by an animal species”).

It lists 25 individual behaviors grouped under nine different categories: resting, alert, comfort/maintenance, locomotion, foraging, antagonistic, sexual, chick care and foraging, and vocalizations. 

While these descriptions may be too detailed for most readers of this blog, it is worth checking the paper out for the drawings of the different behaviors – they are both cute and highly illustrative. Fortunately, the author, Dr. V. Gokula, allowed me to share some of them:

One problem for the pelicans is that their roosting and nesting trees are getting rarer as trees are being cut. The result: Overcrowding (source).

Another result: pelicans using telecoms towers as roosting sites (source), which a paper almost poetically calls “Urban Sky Roosts”.

There is even a paper just looking at the published papers on the Spot-billed Pelican. So, at the time of publication of that paper (in 2013), 380 works had appeared on the species. Most appeared as articles in journals (48.2%), while there were also 4 dissertations, 76 reports, and 6 articles in popular science magazines.