A pelican named Naughty Boy has become notorious for his silly antics, which are drawing visitors to a small town on Western Australia’s Midwest coast.<\/p>\n
The bold pelican has become known for grunting at feeders, lunging at terrified toddlers, playing dead, and trapping seagulls inside his bill.<\/p>\n
He is the newest and youngest member of a scoop of pelicans in Kalbarri, which are offered fish by volunteer feeders every day in sessions that have been running for nearly 50 years.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Strange behaviour draws a crowd<\/p>\n
Naughty Boy the pelican often snaps at seagulls competing with him for fish. (Supplied: Phil Hammond Photography)<\/p>\n
The volunteers say Naughty Boy’s personality and strange behaviours are like nothing they have seen before.<\/p>\n
“He’s very naughty, he’s very young, and he’s just got a male attitude,” pelican feeder Jude Anderson said.<\/p>\n
“He demands the feed, he runs around, he’s vocal, he holds his wings out.”<\/p>\n
Naughty Boy began to gain notoriety about a year ago, when tour guide Kiyeop Kim captured a video of him holding an entire seagull inside his fleshy bill.<\/p>\n
The seagull had been competing with Naughty Boy for a fish and had to be rescued by pelican feeder Jess Higgot.<\/p>\n
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“Had she not done that, he [the seagull] was going to be dinner,” Ms Anderson said.<\/p>\n
“The seagull was actually pointing down headfirst, which is the way that these guys feed.<\/p>\n
“If he grabs the seagulls, everyone is so entertained, they think it’s so funny.<\/p>\n
“It’s not our intention that he eats the birds.”<\/p>\n
Naughty Boy the pelican does not leave a mark when he grabs fish from audience members, according to volunteer feeders.\u00a0 (ABC Midwest & Wheatbelt: Brianna Melville)<\/p>\n
The three-year-old pelican has also been captured snapping his beak onto other pelicans and the hands of anyone who is not quick enough to throw him a fish.<\/p>\n
However, Ms Anderson said while this could be scary for the children, his beak was gentle and it did not cause any harm.<\/p>\n
“They [pelicans] don’t leave a mark,” she said.<\/p>\n
“They’re not vicious. He wants the food.”<\/p>\n
Pelican plays dead\u00a0<\/p>\n
Naughty Boy often “plays dead” for onlookers during feeding sessions at Kalbarri. (Supplied: Liss Owen)<\/p>\n
The theatrical bird is known to “play dead” by splaying out on the ground during feeding sessions or tucking his head beneath his wings and pretending not to notice what’s going on around him.<\/p>\n
Ms Anderson said Naughty Boy had become a drawcard, and visitor numbers at the feeding sessions had been high this year.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Naughty Boy delights crowds when he comes to educational feeding sessions in Kalbarri. (Facebook: Kalbarri Pelican Feeders\/Michele Tunnecliffe)<\/p>\n
“We get people from all around the world,” she said.<\/p>\n
Ms Anderson said the Kalbarri feeding had continued for so long that she often met parents who saw the pelicans decades ago returning with their own children.<\/p>\n
“Every day someone puts their hand up that they were here 20, 30 years ago,” she said.\u00a0<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Jude Anderson says Naughty Boy keeps crowds entertained. (ABC Midwest & Wheatbelt: Brianna Melville)<\/p>\n
Ms Anderson said the birds also came to the volunteers at times with fishing hooks or line stuck to them, which they removed.<\/p>\n
She said the amount of fish offered to the pelicans during feeding sessions was only a very small portion of their daily intake, meaning they continued to hunt many more fish on their own.<\/p>\n
“It’s just like a little morning tea for them,” she said.\u00a0<\/p>\n
The volunteers say pelicans are nomadic, and they expect Naughty Boy may soon move on to another location.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Naughty Boy the pelican is known for bossing other pelicans around.\u00a0 (Supplied: Facebook\/Kalbarri Pelican Feeding, Philip)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A pelican named Naughty Boy has become notorious for his silly antics, which are drawing visitors to a…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":159282,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[26],"tags":[104976,16574,35875,5593,104971,104972,111,139,69,3488,104975,147,104973,68616,104974,406],"class_list":{"0":"post-159281","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-wildlife","8":"tag-animal-feeding","9":"tag-bill","10":"tag-bird","11":"tag-funny","12":"tag-naughty","13":"tag-naughty-boy","14":"tag-new-zealand","15":"tag-newzealand","16":"tag-nz","17":"tag-pelican","18":"tag-pelican-feeding","19":"tag-science","20":"tag-seagull","21":"tag-silly","22":"tag-viral-bird","23":"tag-wildlife"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/159281","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=159281"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/159281\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/159282"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=159281"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=159281"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=159281"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}