About 80% of California brown pelicans breed in Mexico. The remainder breed in the Channel Islands on Anacapa and Santa Barbara. However the lack of food is changing their migration habits, causing them to remain in the Pacific Northwest were fish is more plentiful. If they stay into December they risk frostbite injury or death in winter storms. Last year 20,000 roosted on the East Sand Island in the Columbia River mouth. Another behavior never seen before is pelicans killing common murres for the contents of their stomach. Commercial overfishing for sardines is most likely the cause of fish-eating wildlife dying in large numbers. The US sardine famine is now in its sixth year.
Sardine fishing is supposedly managed, but managing sardine populations is difficult since the number of sardines fluctuates considerably and computer modeling does not work. Despite the crash, commercial sardine fishing continues. During the first half of the 20th century, the California sardine fleet took 70% of mature fish, but it was over by 1950's and recovery would take thirty years. Unlike the passenger pigeon, which was hunted into extinction, the sardines survived but they are still overfished. Mexico and Canada are taking three or four times what the US expects under a supposed cooperative management effort (Magnuson Fishery Conservation & Management Act). It is time to shut the fishery down and let it recover if it can. That is not a radical position. Even NOAA biologists say the same mistakes that shut down Monterey Bay's Cannery Row are being made again. According to the biologists, "eminent collapse is likely". As usual wildlife is paying the price of man's greed.