Pelicans, Pelicans, and More Pelicans

Thanks for this. I love our San Diego birds, even the crows. This morning, like every morning just after dawn, I watch as 100 or more crows make their way en masse over South Park, coming from South Bay and heading to the North County landfills. It’s kind of awesome.

Reply

Pelican’s bait balls in Ocean Beach were most likely due to California corbina, which are a good, mild-flavored fish with a soft texture and low fat content. They are bottom eaters. They have a long, slender, cylindrical-shaped body with a barbel on the tip of the lower jaw. Corbina dine almost exclusively on sand crabs— soft-shelled sand crabs. Pier anglers can sometimes spot beds of sand crabs near piers during low tides. These are the areas the corbina will invade and seek out food as the tide moves inshore.

Reply

Another report of bait balls in Ocean Beach involved very large “sand crabs” (Emerita analoga) aka “Mole Crab,” a gray soft shelled crab that hides in the sand where surf washes and withdraws, revealing V-shaped feathery antennae that capture microscopic organic food. People see them where the water is a quarter inch or less, as do shore birds. Now, when I was a little boy living in Long Beach decades before the rip-rap marinas and Queen Mary, my father and I went surf fishing for corbina, barred perch, and croaker using those large sand crabs as bait. But when I came to live in San Diego, the sand crabs here were always tiny (smaller than a dime) and useless for fishing bait. Now suddenly there is a bloom of millions of large sand crabs in Ocean Beach. I would like to hear from a marine biologist why this has suddenly happened?

Reply

I’ve been waiting for ornithologists somewhere to make the OB pelicans on the pier a case study! Is this normal to have the pier taken over by pelicans en masse?!! Is the ocean filled with more fish these days, attracting the pelicans, or did the pelicans swoop in simply for the sake of the empty pier… and is there enough fish for them all?!!

Reply