The White Pelican

Laurent Verdin Sr. of Crooked Bayou Blue spent a lifetime carving the birds of his native Louisiana. Most of the thousands he made were functional duck decoys for hunters. The White Pelican, the state bird, is one of his purely decorative works. Owned by Anne and Dick Stephens, the whimsical creature was shown in the Historic New Orleans Collection’s recent exhibition of wildfowl carvings from southeast Louisiana. Louisiana Cultural Vistas, the magazine of the Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities, highlighted the show’s catalog in its Winter 2008–09 issue.