This is a Great White Pelican. Several of them congregate in the spring along the Mississippi River at the Lock and Dam near Hastings Minnesota. I captured a picture of this one standing on a sunken log. It was a windy day. You can see the feathers on its head were blown. I found some interesting details about this bird.

Pelicans have a long history of cultural significance in mythology, and in Christian and heraldic iconography. In medieval Europe, the pelican was thought to be particularly attentive to her young, to the point of providing her own blood by wounding her own breast when no other food was available. As a result, the pelican came to symbolize the Passion of Jesus and the Eucharist. In Saint Thomas Aquinas�¢??, Adoro te devote or Humbly We Adore Thee, within the a final verse, he describes Christ as the loving divine pelican, able to provide nourishment from his breast. Elizabeth I of England adopted the symbol, portraying herself as the mother of the Church of England. Nicholas Hilliard painted the Pelican Portrait of her around 1573. The device of a pelican in her piety or a pelican vulning (to wound) herself was used in heraldry. Both Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, and Corpus Christi College, Oxford, feature pelicans on their coats of arms. A possible derivation is the tendency of the bird to rest with its bill on its breast; the Dalmatian Pelican has a blood-red pouch in the early breeding season and this may have contributed to the myth.

This poem is a Codary.
The Codary is a creation of a fellow Fanstorian, Gregory Cody, which takes it name from a derivation of his last name. It is syllabic and stanzaic in nature. It begins with a single line, then a couplet (two lines), then a Tercet (three lines). Then it declines to a couplet, and finally closes with a single line again. So the line counts become 1-2-3-2-1.

It has an unusual syllable count as well: 8, 5-5, 5-5-5, 5-5, 8.

The Rhyme scheme is a, b-b, c-c-c, d-d, a

This photograph was taken by the author himself on April 29, 2018.

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