A pelican thought it was a fish, but swallowed a cellphone. And then the intern stepped in
A hungry pelican homed in on his next meal at a marina in the Florida Keys: a shiny object held by a woman.
Easy prey, yummy meal. So the big bird snatched it and swallowed.
But it was no fish.
The pelican had just eaten the woman’s cellphone.
Then, no surprise, the bird got some bad heartburn.
Seeing the bird in distress, the woman used another phone to call the Florida Keys Wild Bird Rehabilitation Center. Workers there went to the Upper Keys marina and brought the juvenile pelican back to the center’s hospital in Tavernier.
Emma McCarthy, the bird center’s intern, and hospital technician Adam Manglitz, worked together to remove the phone from the bird’s stomach.
It involved reaching down into the pelican’s mouth. And beyond.
Manglitz held the pelican’s mouth open while the intern stuck her arm all the way down the bird’s throat and into its stomach, said Jordan Budnik the center’s executive director.
She found the phone down there, scooped it up and removed her arm from the pelican’s insides.
The phone was in one piece. But ...
“It was covered in fish bits and worms, so it was pretty disgusting,” Budnik said.
Pelicans have large esophagi and stomachs, so choosing a staff member with small hands, like McCarthy, to reach into the bird was preferable to putting the animal under anesthesia, Budnik said.
Budnik declined to name the marina where the bird ate the phone on Feb. 23, but said the incident highlighted the need to educate people more on the importance of not feeding wildlife.
“Feeding wildlife has long-term, ongoing consequences, including making animals so accustomed to being around humans that it changes their natural behavior and puts them in harm’s way,” she said. “Please don’t feed our wildlife. It is against the law and does serious harm.”
Budnik emphasized, however, that the owner of the phone did nothing wrong. The bird saw a shiny object, assumed it was a fish and snatched it, she said.
“They called us immediately, and we were able to get down there quickly, get the bird and retrieve the cellphone as soon as it came into our hospital,” Budnik said.
The pelican has since recovered, and the staff released it back into the wild.
And the phone? It wasn’t working after being retrieved from the pelican and it was returned to the owner.
The wild bird center consists of two facilities — the Laura Quinn Wild Bird Sanctuary on the bay side of mile marker 93.6, and Mission Wild Bird at mile marker 92, also on the bay side of U.S. 1. The former is a wooded sanctuary that can house more than 90 non-releasable birds.
Mission Wild Bird is a hospital and rehabilitation facility, as well as an educational center and gift shop.
Although about 40 species of birds live in the sanctuary, Budnik said pelicans are the most commonly treated at the hospital. That is largely because they suffer pouch injuries when they eat fish carcasses people discard. They eat them both when people intentionally feed them or when the carcasses are thrown in the water.
“The fish have razor sharp bones that can cut the pouches open,” she said. “Some populations of pelicans will actually seek people out. We encourage people not to interact with them.”
To contact the bird center
For more information on the sanctuary, or to report an injured bird, go to missionwildbird.com or call the center’s hotline at 305-852-4486, ext 1.
This story was originally published March 4, 2020 at 1:18 PM.
