The brown pelican's recovery from near-extinction due to DDT is one of conservation's great success stories, but ongoing threats from fishing gear entanglement, oil spills, and habitat disruption continue to affect individual welfare.
Despite their recovery from the DDT catastrophe, individual brown pelicans continue to suffer from human-caused welfare harms. Monofilament fishing line entanglement is the most significant: pelicans that become entangled in discarded or lost fishing lines progressively lose blood supply to entangled limbs, develop infected wounds, and cannot fly or feed. Death from starvation or predation follows if untreated. Hook ingestion causes internal injury and impairs swallowing. Oil spill victims lose feather waterproofing and thermoregulation ability, face hypothermia and drowning, and suffer the physical and physiological effects of oil ingestion during preening. Wildlife rehabilitation facilities that treat these birds make direct welfare contributions — many pelicans treated for fishing line injuries survive and return to wild populations.