THUNDER BAY — There's a happy conclusion to the story of an injured bird that turned up at a residence on the Lake Superior shoreline east of Thunder Bay several months ago.
Penny the pelican has found a permanent home at an internationally-recognized seabird rehabilitation centre in Florida, where she'll also have a job.
"We got the Disney ending we were hopeful for," Deb Bissonnette told TBnewswatch.
The young bird first came to the attention of the family when it showed up in poor condition outside their Birch Beach home in Shuniah on Aug. 31.
"She had a large wound to her body and her neck, obviously in jeopardy. It was twisted, it wasn't proper," Bissonnette recalled in an interview in October. "She had trouble swallowing. We could tell she was weak and not doing so great."
Over the next several weeks, the pelican slowly regained her strength thanks to daily feedings of three to four pounds of raw fish.
In early October, Penny flew a few kilometres down the lakeshore, where she spent a week making more friends as she explored the length of McKenzie Beach in search of meals.
But when it became apparent she had missed the window for migrating from her summer home in Northwestern Ontario to the Gulf of Mexico, residents set out to find a rescue centre that would accept her.
She was transported by Bearskin Airlines at no cost to the Turtle Pond Wildlife Centre in Sudbury, where she received a thorough health assessment, x-rays and bloodwork, and soon started putting on weight.
Because she was too habituated to humans, however, she could no longer be returned to the wild, and required a facility suitable for permanent placement.
Worried that the bird might ultimately have to be euthanized, Bissonnette reached out to Hope for Wildlife in Nova Scotia, which referred her to Pelican Harbor Seabird Station in the Miami area.
"I called there and did some pretty good begging, and bragging about Penny and how amazing she was," she said. "They have an ambassador bird program, which means birds that are not able to go back to the wild become educational birds."
The people at Turtle Pond posted on their Facebook page that it took "weeks of planning, permits, mounds of paperwork and $$" before permission was received to send Penny to Florida, where she arrived on Friday.
Bissonnette is grateful to Turtle Pond for the care it provided for the bird, and for driving her nine hours to Detroit to put her on a direct flight to Miami.
"It's amazing...I kept saying to my daughter [Alex], because she really drove the five weeks that Penny was at our house and kept me calm... 'You can't always expect a Disney ending, and we may not get it.' So now that we have that ending, I'm a believer... It took a village, but Penny got the Disney ending, and every person in her village moved a mountain for her," she said.
In a social media post, Don Smith, a Shuniah resident who also came to the bird's aid, called it a Christmas miracle, saying Penny became an inspiration to everyone who helped out.
"Thanks to Deb and the Birch Beach gang and to all my McKenzie Beach neighbours for stepping up to the plate to save this beautiful bird," he wrote.
Since Saturday, Bissonnette has been in touch twice with the staff at Pelican Harbor, and she's been told "they love her there already."
