Junk Food Danger to Oregon’s Brown Pelicans
People feed the birds bread, popcorn, and junk food, which is very bad for the birds. Very bad. Please don’t do it.
Sharnelle Fee, director of state department’s Wildlife Center of the North Coast, said she has treated pelicans who have eaten hot dogs, doughnuts, potato chips and even chicken bones.
“When you have a hungry pelican, they’re going to eat anything you put in front of them,” Fee said. “These kinds of foods can actually kill them.”
Scientists advise people to avoid feeding any wildlife, but they are particularly strident in their appeals about pelicans because the availability of human food may be encouraging them to stay on the north coast during the winter instead of heading south to their Baja California breeding grounds.
The article also notes that the brown pelicans have been hanging around on the Oregon coast (we saw some a couple of years ago in November in Yachats) and they don’t know why that is. Climate changes/global warming wouldn’t have anything to do with it I suppose…
