American White Pelican — Pelícano Blanco
(Pelecanus erythrorhynchos)

The Elkhorn Slough, located in Monterey County, California, is one of the richest estuarine avian habitats in North America. I have lived in close proximity to the Slough for more than two decades and have spent countless hours there. Observing birds in a beautiful habitat is perhaps the most spiritually enriching way I spend time. The incredible diversity of avian species found here is mind-boggling. Consider that American White Pelicans are evolutionarily old birds. I refer here to a section from The Beak of the Finch on adaptive radiations (how one species diversifies and evolves into many different species):

At every moment in the history of life, including our own moment, adaptive radiations are in progress all over the earth. They decorate the map of every part of the globe in every era like the compass roses of the old cartographers, or cross sections through the branches of a growing tree. The history of these adaptive radiations is the history of life, from the explosive radiations of the bizarre fauna of the Cambrian, 540 million years ago, to the radiation of the first jawless vertebrates, the Agnatha, in the Ordovician, 500 million years ago; the radiation of fish in the Devonian; amphibians and insects in the Carboniferous; dinosaurs and mammals; beginning in the Triassic; angiosperms and yet more insects in the Cretaceous; and in the Pleistocene, a few million years ago, radiations of herbs and human beings.