Young pelicans are turning up starving in Santa Cruz County; scientists are working to understand why

This time last year, brown pelicans were making headlines after showing up in odd places, such as Coasters Bar & Grill across from the Santa Cruz Beach Boardwalk and at Oracle Park, home of the San Francisco Giants. The disoriented birds were starving and in search of food. Brown pelicans are once again in trouble. 

Since April 13, Native Animal Rescue in Santa Cruz has rescued at least 47 pelicans. The Northern California International Bird Rescue Center in Fairfield has taken in 80 birds since March. The birds are being rescued from Monterey to Mendocino, with the majority coming from the Monterey Bay area, said JD Bergeron, CEO of International Bird Rescue.

While the rescue groups are finding far fewer birds than they had this time last year, when Native Animal Rescue had 114 birds, experts say there is a noticeable difference in these events. This year, they are rescuing juvenile birds. 

Wildlife experts suspect the trend is linked to an outbreak of domoic acid and saxitoxin that is plaguing adult pelicans in Southern California, from San Diego to Santa Barbara. 

Toxic blooms

Both domoic acid and saxitoxin are neurotoxins created by harmful algal blooms. An excess of nutrients, unusually high water temperatures and extreme weather can cause normal ocean algae to grow out of control and become harmful algal blooms. These toxins build up in the fish and shellfish that eat the algae. When a pelican, or any other creature, eats these fish, the toxin can poison them. 

The outbreak isn’t directly affecting birds in Northern California. Since it is only young birds being found in Santa Cruz, experts believe that the freshly hatched birds have been left on their own by sick parents in Southern California and are traveling north without learning how to hunt properly. 

“The adult pelicans couldn’t take care of their young because they were sick. And so the young pelicans were trying to fend for themselves, but they were too young to really catch fish,” said Eve Egan, executive director of Native Animal Rescue. “So I believe that since we’re only seeing the young pelicans, they somehow have made it up this far but are starving because they aren’t proficient at catching fish.”

Bergeron agreed, saying, “It is pretty good logic that adults that have been impacted by [domoic acid] will not be able to feed their young. And now their young are probably trying a little bit earlier than they normally would to hunt for themselves — and they’re not succeeding.”

Corinne Gibble, an environmental scientist in the seabird health program at the California Department of Fish and Wildlife, performs autopsies on pelicans that have been found dead. She said it could be the case that the juvenile birds are simply coming north and having trouble hunting for food, but scientists are still performing autopsies to see if the young birds that have died were affected by the algal blooms as well. She says it’s not typical to see both domoic acid and saxitoxin active at the same time. 

Though no birds have tried to enter a bar, they are showing up in places as far as Ben Lomond looking for food. Since they are starving, they appear docile and lethargic. 

“They’re seabirds. That’s why they’re by the ocean. But because they’re starving, they’re seeking food elsewhere and are also a little bit disoriented. So they might end up in strange places,” Egan said. 

This year’s pelican starvation event is far less dire than what happened last year. According to its website, International Bird Rescue admitted 266 brown pelicans to its Northern California center last year. 

Despite this, Bergeron is still concerned. “Anytime you start seeing large numbers, it could very well be that we just had a really good year of baby pelicans,” he said. However, he added, the number of pelicans found starving and acting strange is something to be wary of. “That to me marks something a little bit more than just baby birds having a problem.”

What’s behind the die-offs?

This is the third brown pelican mass starvation event since the start of the decade. Experts are still trying to understand what is driving this alarming trend. This year’s event seems more straightforward, but there is still no definitive answer to what caused the crises in 2022 and 2024. 

It could be that there were fewer fish in the area as Amy Red Feather, a Native Animal Rescue wildlife technician, posited during last year’s starvation event. Bergeron noted, however, that those who keep track of fish populations did not notice fewer fish and that other animals that eat the same fish were not found starving. 

Bergeron favors the theory that “the blob” — a mass of warm water that caused a massive marine heatwave in 2014 and which continues to persist — caused fish to move deeper into colder waters. He says that pelicans can dive only about 6 feet into the water, so the fish might have been out of their reach. 

“The best guess we have from last year is that the prey was too low in the water,” Gibble said. “We weren’t seeing large die-offs last year for other species that eat the same things.”

Egan thinks the more plausible theory is that storm conditions made it harder for pelicans to see their prey in the choppy waters. “The temperature of the water last year around that time wasn’t really warmer than usual, but we had some winds and rough water,” she said.

The pelicans are not testing positive for the avian influenza (bird flu) outbreaks that are affecting wild birds across the county. The symptoms of domoic acid poisoning and bird flu are very similar, but International Bird Rescue and California Department of Fish and Wildlife have not seen any cases of influenza in the birds they tested.  

It will take time to fully understand what is behind these occurrences, but their frequency concerns Bergeron. “Things do repeat, but they don’t usually repeat year over year. Seasonally, they sort out. Multiple pelican crashes happened in the early 2010s. Now we’re seeing it again,” he said. “You don’t really expect to see the same challenge.”

Bergeron and Gibble say they believe that climate change is causing pelicans to face mass poisoning and starvation events more consistently. 

“Everything’s changing. Harmful algal blooms are increasing in intensity, duration and frequency globally. We might have more weird weather events,” said Gibble. 

If these events continue to happen so often, with less time between each, it could make it harder for the pelican population to recover, Gibble said.

What to do if you see a pelican 

Egan and Bergeron both urge people to be on the lookout for and to report pelicans in distress. If you see a pelican alone in an unusual location, you can notify Native Animal Rescue at 831-462-0726 or International Bird Rescue at 866-SOS-BIRD (866-767-2473). If you find a pelican that is already dead, you can report it to the California Department of Fish and Wildlife here. 

Once Native Animal Rescue receives a call about a bird, the organization picks them up and stabilizes them with fluids, and within a few days they start eating fish. Then they are transferred to the International Bird Rescue San Francisco Bay-Delta Center in Fairfield for further care. 

Bergeron notes that if you are able to get surprisingly close to a pelican, that bird is most likely in need of help. 

“We’ve had all these stories of people that take a picture because they’ve come so close to an animal, they’ve never been so close,” Bergeron said. “That was probably the last moment that bird had to be rescued before succumbing to whatever it was struggling with.”

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