Their flight graced the sky before people settled here. Their swimming graced the river waters before people drew imaginary dotted lines upon this land and gave different sides of the lines different names.
But not until people settled the land and invoked permanent changes did the white pelicans stay to live here as their summer home.
What: The Noontime Nature lecture, "Master of Water Ballet: White Pelican."
When: Noon Tuesday, June 4, and repeated 6-7 p.m. Wednesday, June 5.
Where: Loveland Public Library, 300 N. Adams Ave., Loveland.
Info: Sixth program in a year-long series about Colorado birds, "Master of Water Ballet" will spotlight geographic changes that have favored white pelicans, explain attributes that make a bird a pelican and highlight recent radical reclassifications of pelicans and which other birds are and are not their relatives.
The Great Plains, as a single cohesive region, was geographically noteworthy for its profound absence of large bodies of open water. Expansive complexes of ponds and marshy areas occurred in places such as Nebraska's Rainwater Basin, but the western fringe of the Great Plains that covered eastern Colorado had no open water other than what occurred seasonally in stream channels.
Limited to bars and islets in such channels, white pelicans found Colorado a place to pass over rather than a destination for summering or nesting.
People changed the pelicans' fortunes two ways. We built dams to impound water in reservoirs large and small, and we imported fishes to put into those reservoirs.
In a matter of a few decades, white pelicans had water usable for both resting and feeding. Behaviors changed with the conditions. The pelicans came and stayed.
By 1962 white pelicans were nesting on an island in Riverside Reservoir east of Greeley. But it is a small island and pelicans are large birds, so the island is limited in the total number of nesting pairs that it can support.
White pelicans need islands for nesting because their nestlings are so utterly helpless for several weeks. Predators such as coyotes, foxes, raccoons and bobcats could exterminate an entire pelican colony in just a few days and nights of hunting to feed their own young.
Peninsulas are not good enough. No islands, no pelican nesting.
But islands are scarce in Colorado's reservoirs; and as a consequence, a half century after they began nesting here, the white pelicans' nonbreeding population exceeds the breeding population. Thus they come and they stay but they do not all breed.
Their great size makes them easy to see and fun to watch, but their appetite for fish makes them easy to scorn as competitors. But the circumstances are inequitably matched. The angler catches fish for fun while the pelican catches fish to survive.
And the way a group of white pelicans goes about fishing can only be described as a water ballet. Watching hungry pelicans get busy makes a trip afield worth the effort every time.
Knowing that the white pelicans have not always lived in Colorado as they do now makes seeing them even more special, for they are constant reminders that life adapts and so lifescapes change.
Kevin J. Cook is a freelance writer and naturalist based in Loveland. His Wildlife Window column appears in the Reporter-Herald every Thursday.