Pelican lunch

On Sunday I took my camera to one of the Northern suburbs of the Gold Coast and was fortunate enough to wander onto the sands as a flock of pelicans gathered on the water. The seagulls were massed around them so I thought that the people sitting on the sea wall were throwing their lunch out to them.

f/8    1/250  ISO200

Happily I started to take a few photos and barely had I started when the pelicans started to march up the beach, one behind the other.

The pelican march  up the beach was quickly realised, a man wearing a rubber apron and carrying two large buckets was setting himself up on the sea wall among the picnickers. The birds were about to be fed!

f/8    1/250  ISO200

The birds were very orderly and waited patiently for their turn to be given a fish carcase.

f/6.3    1/400  ISO200

Sometimes the birds would catch the fish and sometimes it would fall on to the sand only to be snatched up with its thick coating of sand grains to be taken to the water to be washed.

f/8    1/400  ISO200

This bird did catch his (her?) fish. How do you tell the sex of a pelican? Its just as well the birds know how!

Taking the fish down to the water. This fish has been caught before it hit the sand so will be swallowed as is , the fish that fall into the sand are given a dunking in the sea and then swallowed.

f/6.3    1/400  ISO200

Once the bird has had a fish it did not return for a second helping, so when the pelican took the fish into the water it would eat it, swim around for a little while and then swim over to the farther bank of sand before flying away.

f/6.3    1/320  ISO200

I hope you have enjoyed seeing my small collection of pelican activity. The movie uploading was a bit of an experiment. The movie taken with my Samsung (still camera) could be uploaded into my Picasa album from where I brought it into the blog. This is the video that just has the thin strip with the play button on it.
Video I took on the High Definition blog camera has been converted to flash video using AVS4YOU and loaded into Youtube before being embedded. The AVS converter I bought a couple of years back would not recognise the file format of the blog camera so I downloaded a newer version. I hope there are no intrusive adverts plastered all over it!
AJ