A brown pelican knocked on the door of a federal fisheries laboratory in Florida with a double-barbed hook buried in its wing, and the scientists inside opened up and took it out.
Staff at the NOAA Southeast Fisheries Science Center’s Panama City laboratory were working through the usual business of shark data and fish population analysis when they heard tapping at the glass entryway.
A brown pelican was standing on the stoop, hitting the door with its beak.
When a biologist opened up, the problem was obvious, and the bird had a double-barbed treble hook driven deep into its right wing, several feet of heavy-duty monofilament line wound around it, and cactus spines in its left foot.
The Panama City team normally puts its steady hands to work on sharks and sawfish, tagging them and surgically implanting acoustic transmitters, so an avian walk-in was a different order of problem.
They held the bird still, snipped the barb off the hook, drew the hook out, unspooled the line from the wing and pulled the spines from its foot.
The whole operation took about 10 minutes, and biologists reported afterward that the pelican stayed surprisingly calm throughout.
“It must have known it was in good hands!” the organization wrote on Facebook.
Given a clean bill of health, the bird took to the sky with no hook and no line on it.
NOAA used the encounter to flag the wider problem, and says discarded monofilament is virtually invisible underwater, takes hundreds of years to break down and goes on strangling and injuring coastal wildlife long after an angler has walked away.
The agency asks anglers to stow used line in a secure container, drop scrap monofilament into the recycling bins at boat ramps and switch to barbless hooks, which are far easier to get out of an accidental snag.
Florida wildlife officials put it more bluntly for anyone who does hook a bird: “Don’t cut the line! Reel. Remove. Release.”
