The once-rare brown pelican may stand in the way of any plan to remove the Long Beach breakwater

PHOTO by JENNY STOCKDALE

Last week, after 12 years of talk and a year of delays, city officials voted to study reconfiguring—maybe even partially removing—the Long Beach Breakwater. And they set an aggressive deadline: The city hired Moffatt & Nichol, and gave the local engineering company just 12 months to complete the study that could bring waves and clean water back to the shoreline that made Long Beach famous.

Although there is a long list of obstacles to that goal—Congressman Dana Rohrabacher’s refusal to even ask the feds to help fund the effort, offshore oil drilling, onshore homes at stake, the Port of Long Beach and a project cost that could run as high as $400 million, among others—the most daunting roadblock could be a fish-eating bird with a sack on its face.

Pelecanus occidentalis californicus—the California Brown Pelican to those of us who mastered neither science nor Latin—is a bird federal and state officials consider endangered. Thousands of the pelicans roost on the 57-year-old breakwater. Led by Leonard Arkinstall, executive director of the Los Cerritos Wetlands Stewards Inc., a few naturalists and I counted nearly 2,000 pelicans during a trip to the breakwater last month.

On what Arkinstall called “a perfect day for bird counting,” we boarded Eva 4, and headed for the breakwater at low tide. The boat hesitated a bit, at first. “Sometimes this thing gets stuck in neutral,” he said with a shrug. “I’ve got to sweet talk it.” After a few tender words, Eva 4 cut across the Cerritos Bahia Marina, past the Alamitos Bay Jetty and out into the brackish water. Veering west toward the Port of Long Beach, we could see the bird clusters dotting the rocks of the Long Beach Breakwater.

On that 13,350-foot stretch of inhospitable rock we found real life. There, just a mile and a half off the coast, in the wake of stadium-sized tankers painted in mist, a kamikaze California Brown Pelican dropped 60 feet from the sky, crashed through the ocean’s surface and vanished. He came up with a mouth pouch of anchovies three times the size of his stomach and flew to the dung-bleached boulders of the Long Beach Breakwater, into the ranks of almost 2,000 others.

“I think I got 80 Brown Pelicans, two cormorants and one oystercatcher in that batch,” said a breathless Eric Zahn, director of research and education for Arkinstall’s conservation group.

Clutching his clipboard, Zahn filled me in on the conduct of the pelicans—how they roost, rest, digest and fraternize with their fellows on the predator-free wall. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS) says a habitat like that is essential to the bird’s survival. But agency officials don’t think that poses an insuperable obstacle to reconfiguration of the breakwater. For one thing, they say, the bird already has unconditionally protected habitat elsewhere on the coast. For another, the Long Beach breakwater isn’t an ideal habitat: It’s near airports, close to the port and the constant flow of oil tankers, closer still to oil drilling, and contaminated by effluent streaming from the mouth of the LA River. When the USFWS issues its atlas of pelican roost sites in 2009, it’s unlikely our Long Beach Breakwater will be in it.

Peering over the brim of his binoculars, steering Eva 4 with his free hand, Arkinstall shouted, “Look at them all! You wouldn’t think they’re endangered!”

And maybe they’re not really endangered.

The California Brown Pelican is a subspecies of the Brown Pelican, nearly every one of which was wiped out in the 1960s when the pesticide DDT entered their food chain, thinning the shells of their eggs; the eggs shattered when a parent sat to incubate. The chemical was in wide use around the world between 1940 and 1970. In just one case, the Montrose Chemical Plant of Torrance discharged hundreds of tons of DDT into Los Angeles County Sewers and dumped DDT-laced waste near Santa Catalina Island.

By 1970, the USFWS declared the bird endangered under the Endangered Species Conservation Act (now the Endangered Species Act). By then, the estimated population in Southern California had declined from its pre-1950s level of 5,000 to just several hundred breeding pairs in 1969. The brand-new federal Environmental Protection Agency banned the use of DDT in 1972, and apparently stopped the freefall of the Brown Pelican.

The California chapter of the National Audubon Society says there are now an estimated 620,000 Brown Pelicans in the world—142,400 of which are the subspecies of California Brown Pelican living along the Pacific Coast. In three recent USFWS reports, including a five-year review, the federal government recommends removing the Brown Pelican, including the California subspecies, from the endangered list because of improved numbers.

Such facts aren’t enough at the state level. The California Department of Fish and Game (DFG) receives no funding for de-listing, so, when the non-profit Endangered Species Recovery Council petitioned the DFG to recognize the Brown Pelican’s recovery, the agency asked the group to pay for research to make its case. The group resisted.

“You can go anywhere along the coast of California and these things are as common as dirt,” Bill Everett, a founding member of the council, told the San Diego Union-Tribune in February. “Anybody who thinks about it at all has got to be going, ‘Come on! These are endangered?’”

Back at the west end of the breakwater, looking out through Queen’s Way Gate, Zahn—a Long Beach native and surfer himself—sighed.

“There has to be a way to have both,” he said. “I’d love to be able to surf Long Beach, but I’d like to know these guys are taken care of, too. Compromises will have to be made by stakeholders on all sides of this issue, but without a comprehensive study it is all just one big guessing game.”

Now, that study is on its way. Whether it will run into what looks like an unmovable state agency is to be determined.

Tags: breakwater, california brown pelican, ddt, Long Beach