I’ve been a regular visitor to Ocean City, Maryland, since I was a newborn in 1949. My paternal grandmother owned a small apartment building providing my family with a free weeklong vacation stay every summer. As a kid I did my share of beach going, board walking, fishing, and especially crabbing during those days. I also had an interest in bird watching or birding as they call it today.
The back bays and coastlines provided a bountiful smorgasbord of seabirds to observe. In addition to various species of seagulls and terns there were great numbers of plovers, sandpipers, oystercatchers, blue herons, little green herons, ospreys and others. However, back in the day there were no brown pelicans or cormorants. However, that would change as time passed.
There were no brown pelicans in the area because in the 1970s and earlier they had become nearly extinct. Like the bald eagle, their numbers were decimated by DDT. But after DDT and other toxic agents were banned, their numbers bounced back and they were delisted from the endangered species list in 2009. Not long after they began showing up in our Ocean City environs in significant numbers.
And today the brown pelican is a mainstay of this resort town’s summer “birdscape.” In fact, Ocean City along with the rest of the Delmarva Peninsula now hosts a large breeding population of brown pelicans during the summer, with an estimated 2,500 to 3,000 breeding pairs.
Anytime I’m drifting for flounder in the back bays, their trademark loping flight will often carry them within a few yards of my little boat. Flocks of pelicans will also collect on the shoals and sandbars. I’ll often spot them diving headfirst into the brine where the unique throat pouch of their bill fills with a few gallons of water as they gather their meals of small fish like menhaden, herring, mullet, and minnows.
It’s been reported that the American white pelican puts in an occasional appearance here but that bird’s normal range is in the Midwest, West, and Deep South, not the Mid-Atlantic. When I visited Yellowstone many years ago, white pelicans seemed to be everywhere there, although I don’t remember seeing any brown pelicans.
For the record, brown pelicans are smaller, have a dark brown body with a yellow head and white neck, and plunge-dive for fish. White pelicans are larger, white with black wingtips, and don’t dive but scoop up fish from the water’s surface.
A few years before the brown pelican reestablished itself in the Ocean City area, the double crested cormorants arrived on the Ocean City scene, invading the back bays and inlet with voracious appetites. Like the pelican and most other shore birds such as herons and egrets, the cormorant has an insatiable taste for seafood. But unlike pelicans, cormorants don’t restrict their hunting forays to the water’s surface. They prefer to dive to the bottom of the bay where they can pick off bottom feeders.
I remember a few years ago when my wife Patti and I were walking across the Route 50 bridge watching as a troupe of cormorants filled their bellies. One would disappear beneath the surface only to reemerge with a small flounder in its bill a few minutes later. It would reposition the little fluke in its mouth until it swallowed it whole head first down its gullet. Unlike flounder fishermen like yours truly, cormorants are not required to honor Maryland’s 17½-inch legal limit for summer flounder, so it was disheartening to watch as these expert diving birds consumed fluke after fluke, fish that would never see a baited hook.
Patti and I spent part of the past weekend in Ocean City where we checked up on the famed White Marlin Open, 52nd Annual edition. This year, due to bad weather and rough seas, the five-day tourney (where each boat may fish any three days) was extended for two extra days. We visited the Marlin Fest grounds on Saturday, but only nine boats had ventured out into the high seas that day and no fish were brought back to the scales.
But not unlike pelicans, cormorants, and ospreys, we are also fans of seafood, so that evening we ate at a restaurant in West Ocean City that overlooks the Isle of Wight Bay. There we had a great view of the bay as we observed a group of pelicans lounging around on a nearby sandbar. Incidentally, a group of pelicans goes by many names, including a “brief,” “pod,” “pouch,” “scoop,” and “squadron.”
While enjoying our dinner, in addition to the pelicans, we noticed the cormorants again at work diving for their dinners along with a trio of ospreys hovering far above the water while eying the bay for any fish that strayed too close to the surface. In the hour or so we were there we watched as the ospreys plunged into the brine three or four different times while coming up with fish in their talons.
By the way, a squadron of brown pelicans is featured in a cameo appearance at the end of the 1993 movie Jurassic Park, a scene suggesting that pelicans may have descended from ancient pterodactyl dinosaurs, or so they say.
White Marlin Open results
Although I fished the White Marlin Open two years ago to celebrate the tourney’s 50th anniversary and brought a respectable yellowfin tuna to the scales (but finished out of the money), I sat out the tournament this year. On the other hand, some 282 boats were entered in this year’s event, billed as the world’s largest billfish tournament. After the tournament was extended for two days due to foul weather and rough seas, the big winner was the team aboard the Billfisher with a 72-pound white marlin that brought $3,914,197 in winnings (second place, a 71 pounder, was brought to the scales aboard Catch 23, basketball great Michael Jordan’s boat, a fish worth $400,000).
The biggest fish of the tourney was a 929.5-pound blue marlin worth $1,237,886 caught by an angler on the Barbara B, a boat that added to its winnings by also catching the largest dolphin of the event, a 32.50-pound fish worth $19,950. The biggest tuna was caught by the folks on the Sea Hab that weighed in at 188 pounds and won $764,325. Pottstown’s own Chris Jones, fishing aboard the Shooting Star, caught the only wahoo of the tourney, a 49.5-pound fish worth $74,145. The wahoo category holds a special place in my heart because when I fished the 14th annual White Marlin Open 38 years ago, our team caught the biggest wahoo, a 63 pounder. The payoff wasn’t all that great back in the day, but it did cover our expenses and then some.
Tom Tatum is the outdoors columnist for MediaNews Group. You can reach him at tatumt2@yahoo.com.
