John Ayliffe is the Pelican Man of Kangaroo Island

A pelican eating a chihuahua? Now that’s something John Ayliffe wouldn’t mind seeing.

TWAM 13 Feb 2016

John Ayliffe knows a thing or two about the eating habits of pelicans. Some of it ain’t pretty.

They can swallow two kilos of fish scraps in a single gulp. They’ll mug hard-working cormorants, throttling them until they drop their catch. They’ll scavenge buns and pies and pigeons that stray too close, the victims flapping helplessly in that otherworldly maw before being ingested. Ayliffe has even heard of a pelican swallowing a chihuahua. He doesn’t have a problem with that. “Useless bloody dogs, chihuahuas,” he says.

It was a strange route that led the 67-year-old to become the Pelican Man of Kangaroo Island. An undiagnosed dyslexic, he did poorly at school – “the only thing I passed was the gate” – but proved a natural at farming. By the late ’80s he and his wife Jenny had a big wool operation on the island; they were expanding, clearing land, raising three children. Life was good. Then the wool price collapsed, interest rates soared and drought hit, bankrupting them within a year. Ayliffe drew a line under his farming life one Christmas Eve in the early ’90s when he had to shoot 2500 of his sheep, a memory he shudders at even now.

He was a complete wreck for a while, he says; but then he picked himself up and made a bid for tourist dollars by running trips to a fairy penguin colony and giving informative talks while feeding the pelicans at Kingscote wharf. Well, fur seals ate all the penguins a few years ago (don’t get him started on fur seals or chihuahuas) but the daily 5pm pelican show is a dead-cert gig; Ayliffe has only missed three days in 21 years (“I’m reasonably consistent,” he deadpans). He loves the joy it brings to people, though there are certain hazards as these giant birds fly in for a feed. Hence that hat. “It’s not for the sun, it’s for table manners,” he explains. “If I don’t wear it they shit on my head.”