Perils of Penelope

Hatched on a rugged, secluded island off the Ventura coast, Penelope was not meant to be a city bird.

But an overabundance of schooling fish seduced the young, winged creature northward until it reached the Washington coast, where a violent storm swept the fledgling to the Gulf of Alaska.

Spent, the bird ended up on the warm surface of a van parked on a cargo barge traveling to Seattle. For three days, while the 250-foot barge inched its way to Puget Sound, Penelope was a stowaway, eating and drinking nothing.

“When I got there he was in very critical condition,” recalled Bob Jones, an animal ambulance driver from Arlington, Wash., who was called after the bird was found. “He was dehydrated and starving to death. One more day and he would have been dead.”

Now, more than three months after his adventure began, Penelope the wrong-way pelican--who was given his name before his rescuers figured out how to tell a male pelican from a female--is nearly home.

He is set to be released Sunday at West Anacapa Island after spending two weeks with a volunteer from an animal rescue group in Santa Barbara.

On Thursday, four days before his circuitous journey was to end, Penelope seemed ready to move on. With his large, gray webbed feet, he hopped on a piece of driftwood in a Santa Barbara County backyard, turned his long, hooked bill skyward and let out a guttural sound.

“He loves all of the attention, I think,” said June Taylor, the Wildlife Care Network volunteer who picked up the bird at Los Angeles International Airport on Feb. 28 and brought him to her home.

“I tried to talk to him a little bit,” Taylor said of the two-hour trek in her Volvo. “But he was very quiet.”

For 12 days, Penelope has lounged around Taylor’s 40-foot pond and waterfall shaded by palms and coral trees with several other recuperating birds. And he seems to have become attached to one of them, a female pelican at least two years his elder with a golden tuft of hair on her small head and a bright, orange-tipped bill, Taylor said.

“They tilt their heads, open their beaks and play together quite often,” said Taylor, a dental hygienist.

Shortly after his arrival, Penelope flew the coop but was found by a neighbor several blocks away waddling along Cathedral Oaks Road. Taylor wrapped one of Penelope’s wings with a bandage to prevent further escape attempts.

As he strutted around Taylor’s pond on Thursday, Penelope struggled to stretch his bound wing, which can reach four feet when fully extended.

“Yes, I’ll miss him, but you can’t get too attached,” Taylor said. “He belongs back home where he was born. Our goal is to care for the wild birds, then release them.”

Jones, the Washington animal ambulance driver, also was elated that Penelope would return to Anacapa Island, where thousands of California brown pelicans nest. Bird experts believe Penelope came from Anacapa because it is the West Coast’s primary rookery.

As Jones rushed the weak bird from Seattle to the Sarvey Wildlife Center’s hospital in Arlington--a nearly two-hour drive--he wasn’t sure the pelican would survive. He had already injected the creature with fluids and placed him on a heating pad.

Jones said he was excited that he was bringing in a pelican, the first such species since the center opened 22 years ago. En route to the center, Jones called a fellow volunteer with whom he often competed to bring in the most exotic animal.

When Jones arrived, he placed the wayward bird on a table. “Top that,” he told his co-worker.

Center officials, who had not dealt with pelicans before, believed the bird was female and dubbed it Penelope, Jones said.

“About a week before it was shipped out we found out it was actually male,” Jones said. “We renamed him Mr. Penelope.”

Twenty years ago, many experts believed the California brown pelican would become extinct on both the East and West coasts, said Paige Martin, a biologist in charge of the seabird monitoring program at Channel Islands National Park in Ventura.

The brown pelican suffered horribly in the 1970s when the pesticide DDT caused the shells of their eggs to become so thin that they were easily crushed during incubation, she said.

After a national outcry, DDT was banned in 1972 and one year late the brown pelican was listed as a federal endangered species. Since then, the species has thrived, Martin said.

For the past decade, it has not been rare for brown pelicans to migrate as far north as the Washington coast or occasionally even to Vancouver, Canada, she said.

But the Gulf of Alaska, where Penelope was seen landing on the barge, was way out of the birds’ normal range.

“That’s very unusual for one to be that far north,” Martin said. “He did have quite a few traveling experiences for a big, brown bird.”