Paul Bickford
Northern News Services

Fort Smith (Aug 01/05) - This summer is shaping up as another bad year for pelicans on the Slave River.

A mid-July survey of chicks has found a survival rate of just 30 per cent - 568 nests produced only 167 chicks.

However, Jacques van Pelt, a long-time volunteer monitor of the flock, says those numbers may be lower when a final survey is done at the end of August.

A normal survival rate is between 50-60 per cent, but that has fluctuated wildly in recent years.

In 1999, the survival rate was an impressive 99 per cent, but declined to 52 per cent in 2000 and 18 per cent in 2001. The following year, it rose to 27 per cent.

It plummeted to a worst-ever 0.5 per cent - one surviving chick from 689 nests - in 2003, likely because of human disturbance of the nesting area on seven islands in the river near Fort Smith.

If the breeding pelicans are scared away, perhaps by a kayaker or low-flying aircraft, they may not return to the nests. Last year, the survival rate was 54 per cent.

"We are dropping and puffing up with something," van Pelt says. "We don't know why."

The pelicans nest in Mountain Portage Rapids, about eight km south of Fort Smith in northern Alberta.

This summer, 1,136 breeding pelicans returned to the rapids - accounting for the 568 nests. Another 1,000 non-breeding juvenile pelicans returned to the Rapids of the Drowned, just below Fort Smith, and Oracha Falls, northeast of Fort Smith on the Taltson River.

Van Pelt has been helping monitor the flock since 1974.

The white pelican rookery on the Slave River is the smallest and most northern in the world, and the only one in a river.