Great white pelican  (Pelecanus onocrotalus)

Great white pelicans are exploited for many reasons. The pouch is used to make tobacco bags, the skin is turned into leather, the guano is used as fertiliser, and the fat of young pelicans is converted into oils for traditional medicine in China and India. Human disturbance, loss of foraging habitat and breeding sites, and pollution are all contributing to the decline of the great white pelican. It was previously heavily persecuted by guano collectors as the pelican preys upon other guano-producing birds (8).

The great white pelican is not a well-monitored species, to the exception of those in South-Africa, particularly by the Avian Demography Unit of the University of Cape Town (7) (8). The Western Cape of South Africa has seen the only great white pelican population increase in the past 30 years. This is likely to be due to a new tendency of the pelicans to feed on offal at pig and chicken farms in the Greater Cape Town area. However, the large aggregations of birds at these sites puts the population at risk of mass poisoning if offal is contaminated with pesticides, as has happened in the past (8).

Since 2002, young birds on Dassen Island, South Africa, have been consistently tagged and banded with colours corresponding to the year of their birth. A bird ringed as a nestling in 1972 was found still breeding 27 years later in 1999 (8).