Tracking device lost on Hilton Head takes 1,100-mile road trip — without its pelican

A Clemson researcher who was following a brown pelican equipped with a GPS device off the Lowcountry coast got a surprise when he looked at his data last week.

One of the tracking devices spent a few days on Hilton Head and then headed across the country on the interstate to Oklahoma City.

“OMG. A pelican stole a truck,” joked one Louisiana scientist on Twitter.

Clemson student Bradley Wilkinson, who is working on a doctoral degree in wildlife biology, is part of the South Carolina Cooperative Research Unit team studying the movement patterns of brown pelicans from the Carolinas through northern Florida.

The birds nest from May to August in the Charleston area, and it was there that Wilkinson said researchers are equipping pelicans — 45 over the last two years — with small, solar-powered GPS devices that transmit their location periodically.

Wilkinson said it appears one of the GPS devices fell off and washed onto a Hilton Head beach.

The pelican originally had been tagged at Bird Key Sanctuary, he said.

Once on the beach at Hilton Head, the device didn’t rest long. It was picked up just a couple hours later on Aug. 2 and then was carted out of town the morning of Aug. 4.

The last signal the researchers received was on Aug. 13 from a residential area 1,100 miles away in Oklahoma City.

The researchers are hoping whoever picked up the device will return it. They are considering asking researchers in Oklahoma to put up fliers in the area.

Each tracker costs the team $4,000, and the missing one could be refurbished and put back into duty, Wilkinson said.

“We put our first round of tags out last summer, and what we learned is that these birds travel up and down the coast quite a bit, anywhere from the Chesapeake Bay to Cuba,” Wilkinson said.

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Wilkinson said researchers also would like to know what happened to the pelican that lost its tracker.

He explained that, in addition to the GPS device, each tagged pelican gets a green plastic band with three large white letters on its leg.

Those three letters are unique to each pelican.

“If someone in the Hilton Head area sees a bird and sees that it has a plastic band on it ... we are always interested,” Wilkinson said.

Sightings can be reported on the Project Pelican website at www.projectpelican.weebly.com.

This story was originally published August 16, 2018 at 4:13 PM.