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# Point Reyes Has a Pelican Drowning Problem
- URL: https://www.gottabekidding.me/point-reyes-has-a-pelican-drowning-problem/
- Published: 2026-08-27T10:03:33.000Z
- Updated: 2026-08-27T10:03:32.000Z
- Description: The otters are organized, systematic, and apparently very good at this. The pelicans have had six years to notice. What does it mean that they mostly haven't?
- Author: Field Notes
- Tags: Nature

*Lontra canadensis*, the North American river otter, is supposed to eat fish. Occasionally frogs, crustaceans, the odd duck. What it is not supposed to do is grab a brown pelican by the head, drag it underwater, and hold it there until it stops moving.

An adult brown pelican (*Pelecanus occidentalis*) can spread its wings more than six feet. That is, by any reasonable ecological accounting, too large to be otter prey. And yet: across 19 visits in 2023, researchers documented 73 pelican carcasses at Abbotts Lagoon linked to river otters. Seventy-three.

Otters commonly severed the pelicans' heads and necks, apparently to reach the flesh around the breast, a signature that allowed researchers to identify likely kills even when nobody witnessed the attack. On land, the hunting runs in coordinated family groups: one otter charges the bank to flush the birds into the water, where the others pursue; once they have a pelican, they grab its head and hold the bird underwater until it drowns.

The behavior has been documented at Abbotts Lagoon since 2018\. As far as is known, this predator-prey relationship exists only in California, and had previously been observed in 2006 at Rodeo Lagoon and in a single event in 1998 at Lake Tolowa. Why here, why now, why pelicans? In the earlier Rodeo Lagoon cases, researchers suspected algal overgrowth had reduced fish stocks and pushed hungry otters toward pelicans instead. The question is still open.

Brown pelicans do not appear to be responding to the predation by adjusting their patterns at the lagoon. The study, as of publication, is less confident than the headline that they're catching on.

Seventy-three carcasses. No behavioral adjustment. The otters are learning. The pelicans, apparently, are still working on it.

**Read the full story at** [Discover Magazine, July 28, 2026](https://www.discovermagazine.com/river-otters-are-drowning-brown-pelicans-at-point-reyes-and-the-birds-may-finally-be-catching-on-49468?ref=gottabekidding.me)

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**Hot Take:** River otters have a fan newsletter and a dedicated webcam, and also 73 documented pelican kills at one lagoon this year. Somehow only one of those facts made it into the newsletter.