The Pelicans of West Central Minnesota

Hats off to Minnesota’s wetland conservation efforts

These photos of American white pelicans were taken in Hutchinson, about 45 miles west of the Twin Cities, and near Marshall. You’re right that this is a fairly new sight in Minnesota, and the backstory is a genuine conservation success. Pelicans were essentially wiped out of the state by hunting and habitat loss in the late 1800s, and it took until 1968 for them to be found nesting here again, after roughly 90 years without a single nesting colony. DDT nearly undid that comeback before the pesticide was banned in 1973, which allowed the population to finally take off.

The recovery since then has been remarkable: Minnesota now hosts something close to a quarter of the entire world’s population of American white pelicans, thanks largely to the DDT ban, legal protections for nesting colonies, and decades of wetland restoration work across the state. Seeing a group of them fishing along a river in a town like Hutchinson would have been unheard of a few generations ago.