Bedford County is known as a tourist destination, and that has been the case for the past week at Shawnee Lake.
Several people have reported seeing a white pelican at Shawnee Lake, and a reader submitted a photo of the bird.
Local resident Laura Jackson, a member of the Pennsylvania Society for Ornithologyâs board who organizes the areaâs annual bird count, said the sightings have been reported online and are drawing crowds of birding enthusiasts. She confirmed the rarity and said the last reported sighting of a white pelican in this area was in 2016 in Somerset County.
The Audobon.org field guide lists the pelicans as migratory, spending colder months mainly in the coastal lowlands along the southern border of the United States and breeding inland during the warmer months.
Bitter cold and the threat of power outages are especially troublesome to medically fragile hospice patients in Oklahoma and the people who care for them.
Hospice providers in Oklahoma have drawn on their emergency plans for several days, making sure patients were stocked with portable oxygen and other supplies in case they lost power, they said.
“At end-of-life, patients are the most fragile that they'll ever be,” said Jordan Landress, clinical director for Crossroads Hospice and Palliative Care in Oklahoma.
So Crossroads staff has been calling their patients regularly to find out whether they have power, whether they’re warm and whether they have running water, Landress said.