American White Pelicans in flight are hard to forget. They travel long distances in great spiraling wheels. Slow and hypnotic, the black and white of their bodies catch light like an Escher print in motion. The geometry of nature.

The first time I saw them, they were circling slow and high, big birds, over a soccer game. One of the parents knew what they were. I was dubious. Pelicans? Over central Texas—who heard of such a thing?

But I saw them now and again over the years. It was the kind of deal where a neighbor would call: ‘Linda! The pelicans are here!’ And as a wheel of them churned and crested over the hill and down above us, we breathed ‘Oh!’

Once I saw wave after wave of them flying northwest over the highway outside of Austin. It was mid-morning the day before Easter. They hadn’t caught their migrating altitude yet, and so were stringing out, and pulling back into circles, finding working formations. Undulating patterns in slow motion. I pulled the car off the road and watched—hundreds and hundreds of magnificent birds lifting off.

Some remain on the Texas coast and in California year round, others migrate, some from as deep south as Mexico far north into Alberta and Saskatchewan. I’ve only seen them up close a few times. While the Brown Pelican is amazing in how it dives from the air for fish in the sea, the American Whites to me are fascinating in flight, aerodynamically at their most efficient moving forward in gyrating groups.

A flock wended their way in slow revolutions high above Lake Temescal yesterday, black-white, black-white in the morning sunlight. Oh!