I'm working as a pure perl developer at the moment but I think this will be my last for two reasons.
1. perl jobs (at least in my experience) seem to earn between $10k to $20k (AUD) less a year than .NET or Java programmers.
2. Its becoming harder to find perl jobs, I get an email from seek.com.au every day but I only see a perl job about every 6 months or so.
I love perl but $10k AUD a year is most of a new motocross bike every year.
As for the company I work for, they are like Amway but evil (a multi level marketing company). So as you can imagine I do a lot of DB, tree, creditcard and rewards processing all of which is written in perl.
My experience does not agree with yours. Pay is about equal for Perl and Java jobs if you are working at an established company with a decent IT budget. There are probably more low-level jobs out there that involve Perl, but once you become a senior developer it's about the same in any language.