Disoriented and emaciated brown pelicans are turning up in California's suburban backyards and parking lots, far from their coastal habitats, and biologists are struggling to figure out what's wrong with the ailing birds. The pelicans are exhibiting very strange behavior, they say.
A social animal, it is rarely found alone. So it was startling to find one bewildered bird in a Kmart parking lot in Lompoc, another outside a Costco in Goleta and a third on the runway at Los Angeles International Airport. One pelican was found at an elevation of 7,200 feet in the New Mexico snow.... "Normally, they're on piers and places where they can find fish,'' said Rebecca Ryan of the Peninsula Humane Society in San Mateo, which has stabilized several sick birds. "Now they are appearing in really unusual places" [San Jose Mercury News].
Researchers first wondered in the culprit might be neurotoxin domoic acid, which ...
