On this scrap of island in Barataria Bay on Louisiana's Gulf Coast, a pelican egg lies bleaching in the sun, separated from its mother by waves that washed over its nest in a spring storm. Chilled to the bone, the tiny bird died inside the shell, a victim of the forces that are causing this island and much of Louisiana's coastline to crumble into the water.
The coastline is eroding and sinking at a rate of 35 to 50 square miles a year, and Queen Bess is going even faster. In the 1950's the island had 45 acres; now it has shrunk to 20. And to the brown pelican, an endangered species that is Louisiana's state bird, Queen Bess is not just another island but a choice habitat. With 342 pairs of pelicans, it is one of the state's major rookeries.
Pelicans breed at home. Richard Martin, a state zoologist, says a bird will return to the place it was born, even as that place is washed away to nothing. ''You'll see birds actually sitting on nestings,'' he said, ''as waves lap at their breasts.''
The Army Corps of Engineers and state officials are now working together to rebuild Queen Bess. A dike of seashells is being built into the bay, and mud dredged from the bay beyond will be used to extend the island to the edge of the dike. If the plan works, Queen Bess will grow by 15 or 20 acres.
The project will cost $561,000, with $400,000 paid by the Army and $161,000 by the state, partly with money from a new Wetland Conservation and Restoration Fund. The fund, created last year by Louisiana voters to protect the coastline, gets money from taxes on oil and gas produced in Louisiana's oil patch.
Once Louisiana had as many as 85,000 brown pelicans. But in the early 1960's the birds vanished; scientists suspect they were killed by Endrin, an agricultural pesticide that found its way into the food chain. ''Louisiana,'' Mr. Martin said, ''has the dubious distinction of being the only state in the country to have its state bird extirpated.''
The pelicans came back in trucks. In 1968 state scientists began bringing them in from Florida and depositing them along the coast. Since then, the birds have taken tenuous hold despite hurricanes and hard freezes. Aerial surveys show ''maybe 1,600 to 1,700 nesting pairs,'' Mr. Martin said. But Louisiana brown pelicans are still on the Federal list of endangered species.
Pelicans are also listed as endangered in Texas and Mississippi and along the Pacific Coast. Mr. Martin said they had returned ''to more or less historic levels'' along the Atlantic Coast and in Florida and Alabama, where they were hurt by DDT.
This year, for the first time since the birds vanished from Louisiana, pelicans struck out on their own. Twenty-seven pairs nested on a small, remote island, Mud Lump, near the mouth of the Mississippi. The pelicans may have flown there from Queen Bess. ''We were real excited,'' Mr. Martin said.
But the Mud Lump pioneers' eggs disappeared. On June 1, Federal and state agents found 83 eggs stashed in a cubbyhole on a Vietnamese commercial fishing boat. Five people were arrested. ''The word on the street,'' Mr. Martin said, is that the eggs are highly sought as delicacies.
Queen Bess birds will nest again in early November. In late September the pelicans took possession of the new shell dike when it was just a few hours old. They preened in the sun as porpoises played in the bay.
But erosion will continue, because there is no cure short of turning back time and unleashing the Mississippi River from its levees. Those levees stopped the floods that carried sediment, building and replenishing the land.
The river carries less sediment now. Canals for shipping and petroleum exploration are chewing up marshes, salt water is intruding and land is sinking. Sea levels are rising all over the world.
''We'd be lying to the public if we said we can stop coastal erosion,'' said Bill Savant, a state conservationist on a visit to Queen Bess.
''But we can slow it down. Unfortunately, we should have been slowing it down 30 years ago.''