After almost 40 years of struggling for survival, the earliest symbol of Louisiana was recently removed from the federal list of endangered species.The population of brown pelicans, Louisiana’s state bird, has rebounded from abysmally low numbers in the ’70s to more than 650,000 today spread across the state and the Gulf Coast.  U.S. Department of the Interior officials and Sen. Mary Landrieu announced Wednesday the bird’s removal from the endangered species list, saying the brown pelican population made a significant recovery from the pesticide threats of the past.The brown pelican was placed on the endangered species list in 1970, though the last known nests at the time had disappeared from Louisiana by 1962, said James Remsen, biological sciences professor.Remsen said the species suffered nationally because of reproductive failure associated with the introduction of the pesticide dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane into its habitat.DDT is highly toxic to aquatic life and becomes even more dangerous to top predators when the chemical concentrates in prey.Remsen said the pesticide interferes with calcium deposition in bird eggshells, which causes them to be soft and susceptible to damage.”It was a pretty clear-cut example of us poisoning them, and once we weren’t doing that anymore, they came back,” Remsen said.DDT was a factor in the overall declining population, but Guerry Holm, research associate for the School of the Coast and Environment, said it was direct poisoning from the pesticide Endrin which killed the birds in Louisiana.Holm said direct runoff from sugarcane fields was highly poisonous to many animal species in Louisiana, killing them directly instead of causing reproductive failure. Dangerous pesticides like DDT and Endrin were federally banned thanks to environmental activism in the ’70s.The bird was eradicated from Louisiana because of poisoning, but between 1968 and 1984, Holm said close to 13,000 fledgling pelicans were successfully reintroduced to the state from Florida.The number of brown pelicans dipped below 10,000 in 1970, but more than 12,000 breeding pairs are now estimated to live on the Gulf Coast. Colonies of 1,000 to 2,000 brown pelicans can now be found on the Gulf Coast, according to the Department of Wildlife and Fisheries.—-Contact Adam Duvernay at [email protected]