{"id":164854,"date":"2025-06-07T11:43:12","date_gmt":"2025-06-07T11:43:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/164854\/"},"modified":"2025-06-07T11:43:12","modified_gmt":"2025-06-07T11:43:12","slug":"rescuers-floored-to-find-a-huge-coastal-animal-very-far-from-home","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/164854\/","title":{"rendered":"Rescuers Floored To Find A Huge Coastal Animal Very Far From Home"},"content":{"rendered":"

As an animal services officer, Troy Lombas is used to rescuing cats and dogs, not wild animals. So when Fresno Humane Animal Services<\/a>\u00a0got a call from California Highway Patrol about a pelican with a broken wing, Lombas was surprised.<\/p>\n

On his drive over to pick up the bird, Lombas began to doubt whether the person who reported the pelican had been mistaken.<\/p>\n

Getty Images \/ gacooksey<\/a><\/p>\n

\u201cHonestly, what was going through my head was, like, \u2018Is this really a pelican?\u2019\u201d Lombas told The Dodo. \u201cI was thinking maybe it was some type of smaller bird that was just mistaken for a pelican.\u201d<\/p>\n

But when Lombas arrived and saw the bird, there was no longer any doubt in his mind that he was dealing with a pelican.<\/p>\n

\u201cMy first thought was, \u2018That\u2019s a really big bird,\u2019\u201d Lombas said.<\/p>\n

Neither Lombas nor the Highway Patrol officer had ever rescued a pelican before, but they created a plan on the spot. They positioned their vehicles to block the pelican from running into incoming traffic.<\/p>\n

As they attempted to catch the pelican, he kept trying to escape, but was having trouble because of his broken wing. Before long, the two officers were able to get the bird into a dog crate Lombas had brought with him.<\/p>\n

Fresno Humane Animal Services<\/p>\n

It turns out that the rescue was unusual for more than one reason. While pelicans are typically found near the ocean, Lombas found the bird close to Coalinga, California, which is over 70 miles from the coast.<\/p>\n

\u201cPelicans are usually beach lovers, so finding one so far from the ocean was like spotting a fish out of water,\u201d Fresno Humane Animal Services wrote on Facebook.<\/p>\n

No one is certain about why the pelican ended up so far inland, but Lombas suspects that perhaps the bird had been trying to hunt fish in the aqueduct that runs along the I-5.<\/p>\n

Fresno Humane Animal Services<\/p>\n

As soon as Lombas arrived at the Fresno Humane Animal Services facility, he and the rest of the staff tried their best to make the pelican as comfortable as possible.<\/p>\n

\u201cIn the office, we played a little bit of ocean sounds and stuff on our phones to kind of calm him.\u201d Lombas said.<\/p>\n

Fresno Humane Animal Services<\/p>\n

After a night at the facility, the pelican was transferred into the care of a foster at Critter Creek Wildlife Station<\/a>, where he\u2019ll heal and recover until he\u2019s ready to be released.<\/p>\n

Thanks to Lombas\u2019 willingness to do an animal rescue that was out of his comfort zone, the injured pelican will get a second chance.<\/p>\n

If you’d like to support other animals like this pelican, you can make a donation to Fresno Humane Animal Services\u00a0here<\/a>\u00a0and to Critter Creek Wildlife Station here<\/a>.\"Woman<\/a>Woman Catches Her Dog Scaling Backyard Fence \u2014 Then Realizes Sweet Reason Why\u201cI thought I was seeing things.”<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"As an animal services officer, Troy Lombas is used to rescuing cats and dogs, not wild animals. So…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":164855,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3847],"tags":[6189,1716,69047,37574,70,1715,1713,16,15,1717],"class_list":{"0":"post-164854","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-wildlife","8":"tag-alana-francis-crow","9":"tag-daily-dodo","10":"tag-pelican","11":"tag-rescue","12":"tag-science","13":"tag-standard","14":"tag-the-dodo","15":"tag-uk","16":"tag-united-kingdom","17":"tag-wildlife"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/114641908835037780","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/164854","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=164854"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/164854\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/164855"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=164854"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=164854"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=164854"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}