Quotes about pelican

A collection of quotes on the topic of pelican.

Quotes about pelican

“Below me Rontu was running along the cliffs barking at the screaming gulls. Pelicans were chattering as they finished the blue water. But suddenly I thought of Tutok, and the island seemed very quiet.”

Scott O'Dell book Island of the Blue Dolphins

Source: Island of the Blue Dolphins

“The nursery of brooding Pelicans,
The dormitory of their dead, had vanish'd,
And all the minor spots of rock and verdure,
The abodes of happy millions, were no more.”

James Montgomery (1771–1854) British editor, hymn writer, and poet

Canto VI, line 74.
The Pelican Island (1827)

Happiness, Dead

“Nature's prime favourites were the Pelicans;
High-fed, long-lived, and sociable and free.”

James Montgomery (1771–1854) British editor, hymn writer, and poet

Canto V, line 144.
The Pelican Island (1827)

“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 see how the helican.”

Ogden Nash (1902–1971) American poet

"The Pelican" (1910) by Dixon Lanier Merritt is another poem often misattributed to Nash.
Misattributed

“Ploffskin, Pluffskin, Pelican jee!
We think no Birds so happy as we!
Plumpskin, Ploshkin, Pelican jill!
We think so then, and we thought so still!”

Edward Lear (1812–1888) British artist, illustrator, author and poet

The Pelican Chorus http://www.nonsenselit.org/Lear/ll/pelican.html, chorus (1877).

Happiness, Bird, Thinking

“The damp packed earth beneath the magnolias was our playground, but even when I was small I watched the middle distance, as if my destiny might arise from the grooved line where the mangroves met the sky. Sometimes a pelican would appear out of the haze, six horizontal feet of pterodactyl in an effortless glissade, cruising just above the treetops, riding down the long, drawn-out minutes of the morning.”

Andrea Lewis (writer) Microsoft employee

"Rancho Cielito" Ontario Review, No. 65, (Fall/Winter, 2006-07)
2000-09

“Each [pelican] has already survived many perils in its young life. As a chick, it fought battles with its brothers and sisters and won.”

David Attenborough (1926) British broadcaster and naturalist

"The Problems of Parenthood"
The Life of Birds (1998)