PELICANS ON THE LAKE

Thought I'd tell you a funny story. The other day, one of our country club pros and trainers sent out an email saying that twelve pelicans had escaped from the Detroit zoo and had taken up residence on the lake by the golf course. I thought, "How cool!" But then I wondered how she knew they were from the Detroit zoo, so I sent an email to our club general manager to find out and asked if they had a GPS device or something on them. He responded with this: "They have Chrysler emblems on their necks and left due to lack of work and food." I had been had! The joke went right over my head, and now I laugh everytime I think of his reponse!

But we really do have pelicans on the lake here at the Country Club of Colorado and there are actually about 15 I'm told. One person observed all of them apparently following a school of fish, zigging and zagging in perfect unison and then dipping their large, scooping beaks into the water at the same time as if they were performing syncronized swimming in the olympics. We have kind of a minor pelican hysteria going on and one email even went out that had a poem I'd like to share:

IN HONOR OF THE PELICAN

A wonderful bird is a pelican,
His bill will hold more than his belican.
He can take in his beak.
Food enough for a week,
But I'm damned if I can see how the helican.

Dixon Lanire Merrith

P.S. This poem is often attributed to Ogden Nash, whose style is very similar