I am on a motorboat pounding across the waves of Tangier Sound in the southern Chesapeake Bay. It is a mild September morning, the winds are strong, and the skies are streaked with clouds.

In the distance, a tiny square rises out of a vast, empty expanse of water. Motoring closer, it becomes clearer. A 19th century farmhouse sits on a tiny island, next to patch of sand and reeds swaying in the wind. Waves lap at the house's foundation. White paint peels off the shingles. Pelicans perch in the damp yard.

This is the last home on Holland Island. In the early 20th century, this marshy fragment of land was 217 acres of farms and forests. It supported a town with a post office, church, school and several stores. Now it is almost entirely under water, and no humans live here anymore.

But claiming the vanishing real estate are hundreds of brown pelicans. The giant, awkward-looking fishing birds with floppy pouches preen and socialize around a skeletal tree.

The last human residents abandoned Holland Island in 1992. It was the most recent of five Chesapeake Bay islands to be swallowed by rising sea levels over the last century. As the people were leaving, the same force driving them away global warming, which melts polar ice and drives up water levels around the world -- brought the brown pelicans here.

These fishing birds normally live in South Carolina and Florida. Never in history did pelicans nest in the Chesapeake Bay, until the 1990's when the warming of winters allowed them to move north.

Read the full article and learn how global warming cleared an island in the Chesapeake Bay of humans and allowed a Florida fishing bird to move in.