Okay, I admit that I was practicing veterinary medicine without a licence. {cue music for Diego - Animal Rescuer} Sort of. I'm going to say right off the bat, though, that I didn't do anything difficult or dangerous or particularly special! {too modest} This morning, Jonas spied an adolescent pelican trying to land on our towel, which was drying on the lifelines. Pelican feet not being particularly well suited to grasping thin wire, it promptly fell off, onto our deck. {Looked more like it crash landed on our deck. I am thinking of painting a yellow circle with a large 'P' for future Pelicans} And sat there - while we took pictures. I noticed that it had a bunch of fishing line tangled on one of its legs, and feeling sorry for our poor pelican, decided to try to catch it to remove the line, if I could. It turned out to be pathetically easy to walk up to the bird and drop a towel on its head. I was able to unwind most of the fishing line, and Jonas cut off the rest. The pelican was lucky; although there was a fishhook on the line, as well as a screw, nothing was actually imbedded, just tangled. {tight enough to cut off blood to the leg - the bird was in trouble} Just before we released it, though, {actually after she released it, meaning she caught it a second time - this time sans towel. She just walked up, grabbed it's beak and the bird wrangler had struck again} we noticed some more fishing line in the feathers on its back, which I traced to a large hook imbedded in its breast. Not so lucky this time, on first impression. Checking it out further, I discovered that the point of the hook had already come out past the barb, so it was a simple matter to cut the end off the hook and push it the rest of the way out. The skin had already healed around the hook, just like an earring hole, {Punk Pelican??? Punklican???} so there wasn't even any blood. We decided that our foredeck was probably a difficult place for a pelican to take off from, so I released it over the water, where it landed and floated away, rather indignantly. Jonas and Sherry seemed quite impressed by all of this, to my amusement. After all, it wasn't much different from pulling out porcupine quills or removing sutures, and although it did try to bite me once or twice (and nearly pulled my tank top off in the process), pelican beaks are really ineffectual as a defensive weapon, nothing like, say, kitty claws. {cue closing credit music - Heather - Animal Rescuer}.