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Above: Great and cattle egrets on North Pelican Island. Opposite page, clockwise from top left: Royal (with orange
beaks) and sandwich terns and a laughing gull (bottom left) nest on South Pelican Island. A tricolored heron lifts off
from North Pelican Island. An American oystercatcher. Great egret chick.
Brown pelicans were once endangered due to the spraying
of DDT pesticide on cornfields. The toxic chemicals bled
into the waterways and estuaries into the bellies of fish which
were then consumed by water birds such as these. The concentrated
pesticide inhibited the ability to lay an egg with a
structurally sound shell. And even if those eggs affected by
DDT didn’t crack when they were laid, they were shattered
when the mother tried to roost. At one point, the species was
almost wiped out. But after the use of DDT was banned in
1972, it gradually recovered.
“Thirty years ago,” Golder explained, “there was only one colony
of pelicans in the state … around Ocracoke, around 1980.”
Then there were less than 100 brown pelican pairs statewide,
but a second colony congregated in the Cape Fear River and the
numbers have skyrocketed.
“Today there’s about 4,000,” Golder explains. “Pelicans
are a real success story.” So sucessful, in fact, that about
30 percent of the state’s brown pelican population nests in
the Lower Cape Fear.
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