Say He Looks Familiar
by Wild Thing
Title
Say He Looks Familiar
Artist
Wild Thing
Medium
Photograph - Photography
Description
I just know this guy was looking at his reflection and thinking he's seen that guy before somewhere. We never used to see pelicans around here ... now they are all over the place and I love it! Their flying pattern is a thing to see. It's a kind of circular pattern and you wonder how they get anywhere!
Pelicans:
Pelicans are a genus of large water birds that makes up the family Pelecanidae. They are characterised by a long beak and a large throat pouch used for catching prey and draining water from the scooped up contents before swallowing. They have predominantly pale plumage, the exceptions being the brown and Peruvian pelicans. The bills, pouches and bare facial skin of all species become brightly coloured before the breeding season. The eight living pelican species have a patchy global distribution, ranging latitudinally from the tropics to the temperate zone, though they are absent from interior South America as well as from polar regions and the open ocean.
Long thought to be related to frigatebirds, cormorants, tropicbirds, gannets and boobies, pelicans instead are now known to be most closely related to the shoebill and hamerkop, and are placed in the order Pelecaniformes. Ibises, spoonbills and herons are more distant relatives, and have been classified in the same order. Fossil evidence of pelicans dates back to at least 30 million years to the remains of a beak very similar to that of modern species recovered from Oligocene strata in France. They are thought to have evolved in the Old World and spread into the Americas; this is reflected in the relationships within the genus as the eight species divide into Old World and New World lineages.
Pelicans frequent inland and coastal waters where they feed principally on fish, catching them at or near the water surface. They are gregarious birds, travelling in flocks, hunting cooperatively and breeding colonially. Four white-plumaged species tend to nest on the ground, and four brown or grey-plumaged species nest mainly in trees. The relationship between pelicans and people has often been contentious. The birds have been persecuted because of their perceived competition with commercial and recreational fishing. Their populations have fallen through habitat destruction, disturbance and environmental pollution, and three species are of conservation concern. They also have a long history of cultural significance in mythology, and in Christian and heraldic iconography.
Religion, mythology, and popular culture
The pelican (Henet in Egyptian) was associated in Ancient Egypt with death and the afterlife. It was depicted in art on the walls of tombs, and figured in funerary texts, as a protective symbol against snakes. Henet was also referred to in the Pyramid Texts as the "mother of the king" and thus seen as a goddess. References in non-royal funerary papyri show that the pelican was believed to possess the ability to prophesy safe passage in the underworld for someone who had died.
Consumption of pelican, as with other seabirds, is considered non-kosher as an 'unclean animal', and thus forbidden in Jewish dietary law.
An origin myth from the Murri people of Queensland, cited by Andrew Lang, describes how the Australian pelican acquired its black and white plumage. The pelican, formerly a black bird, made a canoe during a flood in order to save drowning people. He fell in love with a woman he thus saved, but she and her friends tricked him and escaped. The pelican consequently prepared to go to war against them by daubing himself with white clay as war paint. However, before he had finished, another pelican, on seeing such a strange piebald creature, killed him with its beak, and all such pelicans have been black and white ever since.
The Moche people of ancient Peru worshipped nature. They placed emphasis on animals and often depicted pelicans in their art.
Alcatraz Island was given its name by the Spanish because of the number of large numbers of brown pelicans nesting present. The word alcatraz is itself derived from the Arabic "al-caduos", a term used for a water-carrying vessel and likened to the pouch of the pelican. The English name albatross is also derived by corruption of the Spanish word.
In medieval Europe, the pelican was thought to be particularly attentive to her young, to the point of providing her own blood by wounding her own breast when no other food was available. As a result, the pelican came to symbolise the Passion of Jesus and the Eucharist, and usurped the image of the lamb and the flag. A reference to this mythical characteristic is contained for example in the hymn by Saint Thomas Aquinas, "Adoro te devote" or "Humbly We Adore Thee", where in the penultimate verse he describes Christ as the "loving divine pelican, able to provide nourishment from his breast". Elizabeth I of England adopted the symbol, portraying herself as the "mother of the Church of England". Nicholas Hilliard painted the Pelican Portrait in around 1573, now owned by the Walker Art Gallery in Liverpool. A pelican feeding her young is depicted in an oval panel at the bottom of the title page of the first (1611) edition of the King James Bible. Such "a pelican in her piety" appears in the 1686 reredos by Grinling Gibbons in the church of St Mary Abchurch in the City of London. Earlier medieval examples of the motif appear in painted murals, for example that of c. 1350 in the parish church of Belchamp Walter, Essex.
The self-sacrificial aspect of the pelican was reinforced by the widely read medieval bestiaries. The device of "a pelican in her piety" or "a pelican vulning (from Latin vulno, "to wound") herself" was used in heraldry. An older version of the myth is that the pelican used to kill its young then resurrect them with its blood, again analogous to the sacrifice of Jesus. Likewise, a folktale from India says that a pelican killed her young by rough treatment but was then so contrite that she resurrected them with her own blood.
The legends of self-wounding and the provision of blood may have arisen because of the impression a pelican sometimes gives that it is stabbing itself with its bill. In reality, it often presses this onto its chest in order to fully empty the pouch. Another possible derivation is the tendency of the bird to rest with its bill on its breast; the Dalmatian pelican has a blood-red pouch in the early breeding season and this may have contributed to the myth.
Pelicans have featured extensively in heraldry, generally using the Christian symbolism of the pelican as a caring and self-sacrificing parent. The image became linked to the medieval religious feast of Corpus Christi. The universities of Oxford and Cambridge each have colleges named for the religious festival nearest the dates of their establishment, and both Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, and Corpus Christi College, Oxford, feature pelicans on their coats of arms.
The medical faculties of Charles University in Prague also have a pelican as their emblem. The symbol of the Irish Blood Transfusion Service is a pelican, and for most of its existence the headquarters of the service was located at Pelican House in Dublin, Ireland. The heraldic pelican also ended up as a pub name and image, though sometimes with the image of the ship Golden Hind. Sir Francis Drake's famous ship was initially called Pelican, and adorned the British halfpenny coin.
The great white pelican is the national bird of Romania. The brown pelican is the national bird of three Caribbean countries�Saint Kitts and Nevis, Barbados and Sint Maarten�and features on their coats of arms. It is also the state bird of the US state of Louisiana, which is known colloquially as the Pelican State; the bird appears on the state flag and state seal. It adorns the seals of Louisiana State University and Tulane University, and is the mascot of the New Orleans Pelicans NBA team, Tulane University, and the University of the West Indies. A white pelican logo is used by the Portuguese bank Montepio Geral, and a pelican is depicted on the reverse of the Albanian 1 lek coin, issued in 1996. The name and image were used for Pelican Books, an imprint of non-fiction books published by Penguin Books. The seal of the Packer Collegiate Institute, a pelican feeding her young, has been in use since 1885.
The pelican is the subject of a popular limerick originally composed by Dixon Lanier Merritt in 1910 with several variations by other authors. The original version ran:
A wonderful bird is the pelican,
His bill will hold more than his belican,
He can take in his beak
Food enough for a week,
But I'm damned if I see how the helican.
Uploaded
November 17th, 2015
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