On a recent visit to Green Bay, Wisconsin this month I watched a large flock of these pelicans fishing, paddling and generally just hanging out on one side of a dam on the Fox River. Thrilled to see them, I looked up their range map to see where they were heading, and I found none of the maps online and in my field guides to really agree or match up. Plus, many of them did not show these birds passing through Wisconsin or Illinois at all (which I knew from personal experience to be wrong). So I made my own map, a combination of data from existing maps, along my own observations.
Cool fact: the species name for the American White Pelican is erythrorynchos, which translated from Latin means “red beak.”
(Note: I intentionally used the Golden Rectangle and Spiral in the layout.)