California’s pelicans are once again starving. This year, it’s the babies

A baby pelican traveled at least 500 miles up California’s coast before landing near Mendocino alone on May 10 — exhausted and starving.

Now, the fledgling is in the care of International Bird Rescue, which took in an above-average number of emaciated young brown pelicans so far this spring. It’s the third starvation event in four years for the iconic California seabirds. Experts can’t fully explain why, though they said climate change is at play.

“Everything’s getting weirder,” said Corinne Gibble, a marine bird specialist for the California Department of Fish and Wildlife. “We’re having harmful algal blooms and more unexpected weather events. What we can do is get more birds into rehab and better the science around helping them.”

To explain last year’s starving pelicans, scientists hypothesized that the birds could not see their prey in choppy, murky water after late-season storms. Another possibility is that anchovies and other fish swam farther below the warm sea surface, too deep for the pelicans to reach.

For last year’s event, the state recorded roughly 1,000 pelicans captured for rehabilitation — and in 2022, for similar reasons, 800.

This year, there are only 250 ailing pelicans tallied so far, but fresh challenges. The seabirds arrived in two waves, sick and then starving.

At first, rescue centers received adults poisoned by a toxic algae bloom in Southern California. The blooms, predicted to become more severe with climate change, have lasted longer this year — and produced not one but two types of neurotoxins: domoic acid and saxitoxin.

And then came the starving babies. The majority of the roughly 250 pelicans International Bird Rescue received since March were less than 6 months old. The center gets about two-thirds of the birds statewide and considers 90 birds a month highly unusual. The state’s seabird scientists are still looking for answers.

Finn Watson (left), Wildlife Rehabilitation Technician, and Kelly Buffa, Registered Veterinary Technician, examine a California Brown Pelican at International Bird Rescue in Fairfield on May 19, 2025.

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Gibble said the breeding season was early and especially successful this year. It’s natural to see the fledglings struggle more to forage than adults, so that might just be amplified right now. In 2012, there was a similar large starvation event for young birds after a booming breeding season.

Rebecca Duerr, director of research and veterinary science for International Bird Rescue, said that’s a possibility. An additional theory about these starving young, she said, is that their parents, sickened by the harmful algal blooms, might have abandoned them before they were ready to forage alone.

“These young birds didn’t know how to eat yet,” Duerr said. “It’s circumstantial evidence, but it looked like, you know, if mom doesn’t come back, they have to leave the nest or they’ll die.”

This California subspecies of brown pelicans breeds from the Channel Islands south into Mexico. Both the male and female pelicans should feed their chicks until they learn to fly, what’s called fledging, at around 3 months old. V-formations of pelicans then typically migrate north together during the warmer months.

ierra Koop, wildlife rehabilitation technician, fills a tray of herring with water to feed rescued California Brown Pelicans at International Bird Rescue in Fairfield on May 19, 2025.

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Gibble, who handles the state’s dead seabirds, will wait to hazard more guesses about what went wrong this year until she has additional test results later this month. She wants to see if the algal blooms also affected the starving young pelicans that died, even though they hadn’t shown symptoms while alive.

Luckily, the numbers indicate the starvation event is slowing.

For Ciera Duits-Cavanaugh, the manager of the SPCA Monterey County’s Wildlife Rescue and Rehabilitation Center, the influx of young pelicans this year is a mystery. “This may be just an annual thing that happens now,” she said. “Three of the past four years have broken our averages, so something is different.”

Times have been tough for brown pelicans before. The birds almost went extinct in the 1960s, thanks to the now-banned pesticide DDT, and were listed as endangered until 2009.

Warming seas present a newer kind of threat. Back in 2014, some seabird populations plummeted due to fish die-offs during the marine heat wave scientists called “the blob.” Some researchers think pelicans in particular might find fewer fish with warmer sea surface temperatures, such as during El Niño cycles, which are expected to intensify.

“We’re really on the frontline of climate change here,” said JD Bergeron, the CEO of International Bird Rescue. “You can read a research paper and get it intellectually. But the feeling of seeing all these birds struggling when they were previously doing just fine is a scary thing.”

Meanwhile, Bergeron’s staff and volunteers at International Bird Rescue’s two facilities in Fairfield and Los Angeles are working around the clock to bring the rescued pelicans back to life.

The pelicans that the International Bird Rescue releases live on average for six years in the wild. The younger birds have a slightly lower chance of survival.

The one bird that stranded in Mendocino County on Albion Flat Beach had flown the greatest distance of any other pelican at the Fairfield rescue center. The small bird is likely a female, though still too young — at around 3 months — for the vets to tell.

Since arriving earlier this month, the pelican has graduated from an inside enclosure, where the birds that need routine medicine and other care reside, to an outside space.

On Monday, the other pelicans stretched their wings, swooping between high perches. The fledgling rested by the swimming pool, sometimes watching and other times tucking its face under its wing.