Pelicans on the Great Salt Lake

Pelicans on the Great Salt Lake

I worked with Dr. Russ Norvell, avian biologist and committed conservation biologist at the Utah Division of Wildlife Resources to process, correct, and visualize spatial data from GPS-collared American white pelicans (Pelecanus erythrorhynchos). The Division is running a program studying pelican movements, with an eye of concern on this Great Salt Lake summertime resident species. The birds are in a bind, with regional development squeezing them to remaining optimal feeding habitat that’s in concerning proximity to traffic at growing Salt Lake International Airport.

  • View from over Tooele County, looking northeast over the Great Salt Lake. The red line is an actual (representative) airliner landing approach path.
  • View the the north across the Traverse Range and Salt Lake valley.
  • View as from high up looking east towards the Wasatch Range.
  • View as from high over the Wasatch Range looking west across the GSL towards the Bonneville Salt Flats. At the south end of the lake (left in this image) the attractive habitat in Farmington Bay is worryingly close to air traffic operations at Salt Lake International Airport.
  • View to the northeast. Note the concentrated “columns” of bird observations at prime feeding locations from which the birds climb thermals to soar to breeding sites or other regional habitat.
  • View to the southeast.

While bird/plane proximity is a regional challenge for planes (and humans) in the Greater Salt Lake City metro area, it’s a continental-scale issue for the pelicans. P. erythrorhynchos peregrinates (if you’ll forgive the taxonomic mixed metaphor) between wintering grounds along the Sea of Cortez and the Gulf of Mexico, and summer feeding and breeding territory inland in Western North America, with a significant breeding population relying on remote and undisturbed Gunnison Island in the Great Salt Lake for raising chicks. (The birds make long distance flights each day to feed, returning to the island with food for chicks; for a first-hand account, click here.)

This means that writing off the food-rich habitat of Farmington Bay, or the safe breeding ground of Gunnison Island, are not viable options for this species.

Pelican locations (from GPS collared birds) during their overwintering season.
During the Northern Hemisphere’s spring season, the birds migrate northwards back to summer feeding and brooding habitat. These collared birds largely follow the Great Western Flyway, a continentally and globally significant migration route for many bird species that takes many of them through the unique wetland resources of the Great Salt Lake and its environs.
During the summer season the collared birds congregate around the habitat resources afforded by the lakes and wetlands of the Great Salt Lake, the Snake River Plain, and the margin of the Colorado Plateau to feed, mate, and raise broods of chicks.
Over the fall birds make their way South again along well-travelled routes to overwintering-grounds along the Gulf of Mexico and the Sea of Cortez.

I corrected collar GPS locations for ground elevation errors using terrain datasets from the AGRC, Utah’s spatial data infrastructure provider, allowing Russ and his team to present and discuss these visualizations to wildlife managers, and civil and military aviation officials, and helping him secure necessary funding to extend this valuable data collection effort.

Russ and the Division’s work with pelican’s has showed up in the news before, and the recent work with GPS collars made the ESRI radar as a case-study.