are trying to find out where it came from.

The brown pelican, a tropical sea bird, was first spotted by a tourist crossing Hamilton Harbour on December 30 and last week it was spotted at Harrington Sound.

On Monday staff at the Bermuda Aquarium were able to lure the bird on to the back dock of the Aquarium with fish and were very close to the pelican.

They were close enough to observe with binoculars that the bird had an identification band on its left leg.

Government conservation officer David Wingate was trying to verify the identification code to find out where it came from.

It is not yet certain how it came to the Island.

Dr. Wingate said it could have been blown here by the weather conditions, or perhaps it was lost as "pelicans are great wanderers over the ocean''.

He added that there were large populations of pelicans in the Caribbean, Florida and North Carolina but "suspects that it is less likely to be from the Caribbean and most likely to be from Cape Hatteras in North Carolina''.

It was not customary for the pelican to fly to Bermuda and according to Dr.

Wingate it "was an assumption that the pelican was an occasional (once every two to four years) to frequent (every other year) visitor to the Island.'' But over the last ten years the pelican has flown to Bermuda every other year.

The last recorded date for the pelican was in 1953, but since then there has been a gap in recorded statistics due to the effect of the pesticide DDT, developed in the Second World War and widely used in the 1960s.

This pesticide had an adverse affect on wildlife and may have affected the pelican populations in the Gulf of Mexico.

However, the pelican reappeared in Bermuda in the 1970s and Dr. Wingate said he believed that the increase in the pelican population "may have something to do with global warming which has shifted the pelican population northwards'' in recent years.