Pelican is a large swimming bird, belonging to Pelican family, also known as gannet. There are 8 kinds of * * * in the world, which are mostly distributed in Europe, Asia and Africa.
The spotted-billed pelican, as its name implies, has blue spots on its mouth and a pink crest on its head. The upper body is grayish brown and the lower body is white. The white pelican is mainly distributed in Xinjiang and Fujian provinces in China, and it is white all over. Both are national second-class protected animals.
Pelicans, people can recognize at a glance, is the big skin under their mouths. The pelican's mouth is more than 30 centimeters long, and its lower mouth shell is connected with the skin to form a large skin bag, which can be freely expanded and contracted, and is the place where they store food. Pelicans are as good at fishing as cormorants. Its length is 125 ~ 150 cm. The whole body feathers are thick and short, and the feathers are pink or light grayish brown. There is a yellow oil gland in the heel of its short tail feather, which can secrete a lot of oil. In their spare time, they often smear this special "cosmetic" on their feathers with their mouths to make them smooth and soft, so that they won't touch water when swimming.
Pelicans often live in groups in the wild. In addition to swimming, they spend most of their time sunbathing on the shore or patiently combing their feathers. Pelicans have sharp eyes and are good at swimming and flying. Even when flying at high altitude, fish roaming in the water can't escape their eyes. If flocks of pelicans find fish, they will form a straight line or semicircle to drive the fish to the shallow water area of the river bank. At this time, they will open their mouths and swim forward, and even fish and water will become its bag. Then, they will close their mouths, shrink their throat bags and squeeze out the water, and the delicious fish will be in their stomachs. A good meal.
In the breeding season, male pelicans often choose a tree as their nesting site, and then land on it to pay great attention to passing females. If the female likes it, she will fall beside the male. After that, the male birds found nesting materials such as branches and aquatic plants, and the male and female birds built nests together, then mated, laid eggs and hatched. After 30 days, the chicken hatched.
Some pelicans gather and breed far away from their feeding grounds. In order to ensure that future generations and themselves have enough food, they fly fifty or sixty kilometers to fish every day. Instead of feeding chicks with nets with throat bags, these pelicans swallow all the fish. Open your mouth wide when you enter the nest, and let the chicks put their mouths into the esophagus to cause vomiting. Chickens feed on semi-digested chyme vomited by their parents. The length of the big mouth of the pelican is five times that of the baby cone, and some chicks simply stand in the big mouth of the parent bird to eat. Pelicans often gather together to breed and sometimes help each other feed other people's chicks. Sometimes even a few pelicans will argue about feeding a chick.
A few months later, the little pelican came out of the nest. At this time, although they can live independently, it will take three years to fully mature. I wonder how long they can live in the wild. The spotted-billed pelicans raised in Beijing Zoo lived for 30-40 years.