CORRELL — If you’re going to clamp aluminum tracking bands on squawking pelican chicks, be prepared to get scratched, bitten and covered in dusty droppings.

But a crew of banders at Marsh Lake in western Minnesota said the risks are minor compared to the thrill of being up close to such large, majestic-looking birds.

A nine-person crew recently banded about 360 birds at the lake, the home of North America’s third-largest colony of pelicans. The banding is part of an effort to understand how the pelicans travel and breed.

“It is pretty cool,” said Jeff DiMatteo, 57, a bird bander with the state Department of Natural Resources. “They really are graceful fliers. Not so graceful walking on the ground.”

A fully grown American white pelican can have a wingspan of 9 1/2 feet. The chicks are Marsh Lake’s Eight-Acre Island were still flightless, but at 6 weeks old were about the size of a Christmas goose.

DiMatteo said it’s a challenge to manage such large birds. Banders have to approach in a slow crouch, but if they move too fast the chicks could panic and trample each other to death.

The crews try to do their work between sunrise and noon, when the adult birds are off gathering fish, salamanders and other prey.

Two years ago the Marsh Lake pelican colony was the largest in North America. Today, with about 10,000 breeding pairs, it’s No. 3 behind North Dakota’s Chase Lake National Wildlife Refuge and South Dakota’s Bitter Lake.