Alameda police could not reach a pelican snarled in fishing line and hooks. One of the boys watching from the dock went into the water after it.
A Bird In Trouble
Illustrative image of a small boat marina. This is not Fortman Marina.
At Fortman Marina in Alameda, California, an Alameda Police Department animal control officer was trying to catch a pelican and getting nowhere. A group of boys had stopped on the dock to watch him work.
The bird would not be caught. Every time the officer closed the distance, it dropped off the edge and back into the water, drifting farther from shore each time.
Then the officer and the boys saw why it was moving so badly. The pelican’s wing was wound in fishing line, and there were hooks embedded in its body.
Police described the officer as simply unable to get hold of the bird at all, in an account the Alameda edition of Patch published on 15 May 2026. Whatever happened next was going to have to happen in the water.
The Boy Went In
A California Brown Pelican coming down onto open water. Photo: Frank Schulenburg via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0. This is not the bird in this story.
One of the boys on the dock went in after it. He was thirteen years old, and in the police account he is named only as Leo.
He did not lunge. International Bird Rescue, which took the pelican in afterwards, describes him swimming slowly out to the bird, closing the last of the gap, and then carefully bringing it back to shore and placing it in the hands of Officer Alaina Onesko.
The police account uses a blunter word for the swim out. Leo, the department said, went in and swam toward the bird “fearlessly.”
What impressed them was not the swimming. “Even more incredible, Leo knew exactly how to properly handle the injured bird as he brought it back to shore,” the Alameda Police Department wrote.
Where He Learned That
Illustrative image of discarded fishing tackle. This is not the gear the pelican was caught in.
So somebody asked him. A thirteen-year-old had just done, without being told, the thing a trained officer had spent that whole stretch of afternoon failing to do.
“When asked how he knew what to do, Leo simply replied: ‘By watching people like you on TV,'” the police department wrote.
It is a wonderful line, and it needs a warning attached — one International Bird Rescue put in the same post that praised him. Wildlife rescues are unpredictable and dangerous for people as well as birds, the group noted, and sharp hooks and fishing line are a serious hazard to whoever reaches in.
“Whenever possible, we encourage members of the public to contact trained responders and avoid handling wildlife themselves,” the organization wrote. With a wild bird that means watching and calling before you decide to pick anything up; with your own bird at home, where you are the trained responder, the first fifteen minutes decide most of what follows.
Four Weeks In Care
Illustrative image of a transport carrier. This is not the carrier used by International Bird Rescue.
The pelican went to International Bird Rescue, which runs two wildlife centers in California. He arrived weak and injured, and staff determined he was an adult male.
Over the following four weeks the team stabilized him, treated multiple wounds on his left wing and body, and worked him back toward the condition a wild bird needs before it can feed itself again.
This is the unglamorous middle of every rescue story and the part nobody films. Getting a bird from alive to releasable is weeks of feeding, wound care and quiet housing, and it is where most of the cost and most of the failures sit.
Owners of companion birds face a smaller version of the same problem, usually at no notice at all. Two things make it survivable: a carrier checked before the emergency rather than during it, and a first aid kit holding the right few items and none of the wrong ones.
A Coast Without Fish
A juvenile Brown Pelican in flight. Photo: Frank Schulenburg via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0.
This bird was not an isolated accident. He was one of hundreds admitted to International Bird Rescue since March 2026, during a starvation event running the length of the California coast.
By the organization’s own count, updated on 29 June, 392 seabirds had been admitted since March. They were mostly Brown Pelicans, Common Murres and Brandt’s Cormorants, split across its northern and southern centers; the northern center alone had taken in 76 Brown Pelicans.
The mechanism the group describes is indirect rather than dramatic. Changing ocean conditions move the fish, hungry seabirds take risks they would not normally take, and weakened birds end up entangled in fishing line or stranded far from the coast.
Which is to say the hooks were the injury and not the cause. International Bird Rescue is blunt about what that means for timing: the longer a bird takes to be found and rescued, the worse its chances of a full recovery.
A Certificate At City Hall
Illustrative image. It depicts no real place, person or animal from this story.
On 9 June 2026 the Alameda Police Department gave Leo a Certificate of Appreciation at City Hall, in recognition of his part in the rescue. By then his full name was public: Leo Batres Montoya.
The department had already made its opinion plain in writing. “Thank you, Leo, for stepping up and showing what it means to care for both animals and your community,” it said.
Then it added a line that reads like a joke and may not entirely have been one. “You never know… we may just be looking at a future Alameda Animal Control Officer in the making.”
Leo had reached the same conclusion himself, and said so to International Bird Rescue. “I didn’t even know there was a job where you catch animals and bring them to safety. But when I found out it was a real paid job, I knew it’s what I want to do when I grow up.”
The Shoreline At Fort Baker
An adult Brown Pelican over Bodega Bay, California. Photo: Frank Schulenburg via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0. This is not Pelican 349.
Three days after the ceremony, on 12 June, Leo stood on the shoreline at Fort Baker in Sausalito and watched the rest of it happen. He had not seen the bird since he handed it over on the dock.
The pelican came out of his carrier banded 349, spread his wings, and went back out over San Francisco Bay.
“It’s honestly pretty awesome,” Leo said of helping animals and learning from the rescue professionals around him. “I get to learn, get experience, and help animals at the same time.”
International Bird Rescue’s own reading of the day is that no single person did this: a member of the public noticed, local responders secured the bird, trained staff did the four weeks. What is worth adding is that the member of the public was thirteen, and that he is the only one in the chain who had to teach himself.
Source: International Bird Rescue, “A Boy, a Pelican, a Rescue, and a Release,” by Daniel Flynn, 19 June 2026, with the rescue itself as reported by the Alameda Police Department via Patch Alameda, 15 May 2026, and admission figures from International Bird Rescue’s 2026 California Starvation Event page. The two accounts spell the marina differently — Fortman on the rescue’s site, Fortmann on Patch; we have followed the rescue’s spelling. If you find a bird in distress in California, International Bird Rescue’s Bird HelpLine is 866-SOS-BIRD (866-767-2473).