CALIFORNIA BRIEFING / LOS ANGELES

The first analyses of blood samples taken from some of the hundreds of dead and disoriented pelicans discovered in recent weeks in highways and downtown areas from San Francisco to Baja California have failed to pinpoint the cause of the problem, biologists said Friday.

Laboratory tests conducted by biologist David Caron at USC detected a potentially fatal algae toxin in some of the samples.

However, whether those toxins “played a primary role, or perhaps some secondary role as an additional factor in the face of some other general phenomenon, is still very much open to debate,” Caron said.

In the meantime, bird rescuers continued to receive reports of pelicans turning up dead or wandering aimlessly in odd places, far from their usual coastal haunts.

One pelican carcass was discovered high in the mountains near Los Alamos, N.M., about 635 miles from the ocean.

“We have received 284 reports of pelicans reported dead or ill since the first week of December,” said Rebecca Dmytryk, spokeswoman for Wild- Rescue, a nonprofit organization.

“We won’t know what the cause is until further tests are done.”

-- Louis Sahagun