When Christian Woehler heard that a pelican had been stranded for weeks in the middle of the Arkansas River near Pueblo Reservoir, he was quick to offer to help rescue it.
Within hours, the Pueblo resident and four others, including a bird expert who determined that the pelican really did need rescuing, had gathered their gear together and mapped out a plan to catch the bird.
Then, two weeks ago, Woehler lowered a canoe into the river near the dam and paddled out to rescue the pelican.
“I tried using a net, but that didn’t work,” Woehler said. “So I ran after it, it tried to fly, and we went up in the air together – and landed in the water together.
“It was quite an event – a swan dive to catch a pelican.”
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For all of its spectacle and drama, saving the pelican was one of the easier rescues Woehler has been involved in.
The Pueblo resident served for several years as a rescue swimmer in the U.S. Navy, a little known but crucial role that involves jumping into seething oceans to save people who have fallen into the sea, or manning an M60 machine gun to provide cover to other sailors as they board pirate and other ships to conduct search and seizure operations.
“We would go up really fast to the side of fishing boats or pirate boats or any boats that raised any suspicion to our ship, and we would drop this ladder over the side – on something called a big hook – and then we’d climb up this little aluminum ladder and board the boat,” Woehler said.
“Most of the time, I didn’t do a lot of boarding but would sit at the front of the ship, which is where they put the rescue swimmer because if (the other sailors) have a casualty or if they get shot at, they were supposed to run off the ship and go in the water,” Woehler said. “That’s when it became my job to rescue them as they fell off, or provide cover with my M60.”
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Those operations and the pelican rescue were relatively tame compared with what Woehler called “probably the craziest rescue I did in the military,” when he and another rescue swimmer saved the crew of a fishing boat that was drifting on high seas in the Pacific Ocean.
“We were out to sea and we got a call from a captain to say a fishing vessel had been sucked out to sea, and they had rope wrapped around their propellers and could not get their vessel back in.
“So Curtis, the other rescue swimmer on board the ship, and I got the crew members off the boat and got them on our boat, and then we decided that we were going to try to recover their craft for them,” he said.
A lot of rope had wrapped itself around the long pole that the fishing boat’s propeller was attached to, immobilizing it.
As the boat pitched on the heavy seas, Woehler and the other swimmer would wait until the propeller was lifting out of the water, “and then we would swim underneath it really quick and we would grab that pole … and cut a little section of rope off.”
As they held onto the pole, the waves would thrust them 15 feet down into the water before lifting them 15 feet out of the water as the back of the ship was forced upward by the stormy sea, Woehler recalled.
“It was like riding a bull,” he said. “It was a really intense, adrenaline-filled rescue. It was great. Everyone came out safe.”
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Pelican is recovering
Everyone, including the bird, came out safe in the pelican rescue, too.
The bird was taken to the Nature and Wildlife Discovery Center on the River Trail before being sent to a facility with a protected lake that is home to pelicans year-round, Diana Miller, director of the center’s raptor center, told The Chieftain.
The pelican has been diagnosed with a previous injury to the wing tip, which didn’t heal correctly, but other than that, it was in good health when it was rescued.
“The bird can fly for short distances at a low height but will most likely never be able to generate enough lift to achieve full flight,” Miller said.
But that does not mean the pelican will not be able to survive in the wild.
“Pelicans do not need to fly to pursue prey,” Miller said.
“They actually float on the water and watch for fish and other prey below them in the water. They then thrust their beak downward to grab. Sometimes they tip so far over, they look like dabbling ducks feeding,” she said.
Karin Zeitvogel can be reached at kzeitvogel@chieftain.com, and Zach Hillstrom is at zhillstrom@chieftain.com.
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