Photo of a stippled blue lake with some weathered white and blue boathouses in the background; in the lower third of the photo, an American white pelican is hopping across the surface of the water as e takes off for flight. The bird is enormous, eir white breast just lifting to a foot of clearance off the surface of the water and eir wings stretched out to eir sides, black tips curled up like the wings of an aeroplane. Eir bold orange bill points forward like a firm rubber umbrella, and eir matching feet flap backwards as e licks across the water in takeoff, a series of bright splashes at intervals behind em as though e were a skipping stone and not a pelican.
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