Revisers of OED have made a pig’s ear of pelican pie, I fear. I’ve been reading for pleasure Peter Gilliver’s The Making of the Oxford English Dictionary (reviewed last week). I’m up to 1904, when James Murray complains he ‘could have written two books with less labour’ than it took to compile the entries for pelican and penguin.
Pelicans enjoyed life for centuries without the British seeing one. John Trevisa, a sort of 14th-century John Aubrey, wrote in 1398 that there were two kinds: one a water bird, the other loving the wilderness. He got this indirectly from St Jerome’s commentary on Psalm 102: ‘I am become like a pelican in the wilderness’ (as the Prayer Book puts it).
Thanks to the fourth-century bestiary Physiologus, pelicans also famously fed their chicks with blood from their breast.
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