www.gemmarose.com.au

A wonderful bird is the Pelican,
His mouth can hold more than his belly can,
He can hold in his beak,
Enough food for a week.
I’m damned if I know how the hell he can!*

I patted a baby Pelican once. It was so soft you could have rolled around in its feathers for a week – off-white and gangly legged with big goofy feet. I stroked my hand on its downy chest and gushed. It was the kookiest looking, sweetest thing I had ever come across.

These photos are from a job I went on for the Northern Star a couple of years ago at Evans Head. Australian Seabird Rescue were doing a cleanup of birds that suffering from the effects of botulism, after eating fish and eels killed by either; a) effluent from the local sewerage treatment plant, or b) the hot weather causing lagoon temperatures to rise and cook the marine life within. Either way its a pretty sad day that sees the loss of the magnificent Pelican. And hundreds of ducks, gulls, eels and fish.

My flatmate Paul caught me mid rant last week. Mid photography rant. He, like my other long-suffering flatmates, is undoubtably very sick of hearing about photography. He interjected something about the environment. Because my brain was so focused on my rant that it couldn’t conceive of investigating the tangent he had introduced, I said, and sadly I quote, ‘The Environment? I don’t care about the fucking Environment’. I would like to take this opportunity to publicly retract that statement. I do actually. I care that because of us, whether it is dumping sewerage where it shouldn’t be dumped, or by heating our precious green planet up so much it kills its own residents, these sweet, kooky birds end up dead in a stagnant swamp.

I’ve certainly got no moral high ground on this platform (see previous inflammatory statement) but I figure it’s 2010 folks. If you can’t conceive of how to make a difference in your own life, surely you can find some way of supporting someone who does (Australian Seabird Rescue rely on donations to exist – and there are many more places just like them). Otherwise I’m guessing our Pelican, whose beak can fit more than his belly can, will continue to suffer the effects of our bad choices.

* There is some contention about who originally penned this poem but my sources say it was Dixon Lanier Merritt in 1910.