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In December 2018, a photograph showing a pelican and a dog lying together on a pier was posted by the Twitter account For Pitty's Sake, along with a piece of text that explained the supposed back story for the image: The photograph is real, but the accompanying back story is not related to it. The pelican seen in this image was named Osman and not Petey, and he was sort of a town mascot in Turkey. The photograph is at least a decade old, and Osman the pelican has since died. We have not been able to identify the photographer who snapped this specific picture, but our searches uncovered a number of other photographs of this unusual pairing of bird and canine that were snapped in Erdek, Turkey, circa 2007. Details about the dog proved to be scarce (Turkey does have a large population of stray street dogs), but we found numerous photographs, videos, and news articles about Osman in that Turkish town. Osman the Pelican and the pictured dog truly did form an unlikely friendship. We found nearly a dozen photographs of the pair walking, playing, eating, and sleeping on the Turkish shore: Osman had numerous adventures, according to local reports. For instance, the pelican apparently didn't fly well due to age or injury, so he often hitched rides with local fishermen to the nearby island of Marmara. Osman also took the stage during a ceremony for the opening of a police station (as seen in the center image of the above-displayed collage), and while Osman was apparently one particular dog's good friend, this pelican was once attacked by other local canines. But perhaps the most relevant detail we came across dealt with the death of Osman and the end of this unusual friendship. According to a fisherman in Erdek, the dog stopped coming to the beach after his pelican friend died:
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