People tend to perceive as “natural” whatever they saw as a child. The birds and animals of centuries past can seem as exotic as alien species if they return. Through the distorting lens of this landscape amnesia, we see the comeback of an ancient bird: the cormorant.
Double-crested cormorants are a peculiar-looking fishing bird with black feathers, long, snake-like necks, webbed feet, and hooked beaks. They often have a pair of shaggy tufts—double crests—on their heads that make them look like disheveled professors. They nest in colonies and sing in grunts and croaks that sound more like a chorus of pigs than birds.
Around the Chesapeake Bay, you may have seen cormorants standing on posts in the water in their trademark pose: with their black wings held out sideways, to dry in the sun. It is this vampire-like posture—and the fact that cormorants eat fish—that has made the birds reviled by fishermen and misunderstood for centuries. Long a symbol of bad luck and evil in Western literature and myth, cormorants have been persecuted and slaughtered by fishermen and even the U.S. government, according to a new book called “The Devil’s Cormorant” by Richard J. King.
“It’s really interesting to see how far back it goes, this sort of anti-cormorant feeling in literature and art,” King says in an interview. “Milton famously described Satan sitting like a cormorant on the tree of life. Shakespeare uses cormorant imagery four times in his plays. And in Shakespeare’s time, being ‘cormorous’ meant being greedy or insatiable.”
Despite the bad rap in Western culture, cormorants are miraculous and wonderful in their own awkward way. They can
Peter McGowan, a wildlife biologist with a federal agency, said he and his colleagues sprayed a portion of the colony’s eggs with vegetable oil, which suffocates the embryos. He said wildlife managers worry the booming cormorant population would crowd out other, more threatened birds. Common terns, glossy ibises, and snowy egrets are competing with the cormorants for nesting space, McGowan said.
“There are other species that are—I wouldn’t say have preference, but they utilize habitats that are quickly being lost in the Chesapeake Bay,” McGowan says. “And we need to focus on trying to provide the nesting habitat for those species. Otherwise we are going to lose those birds from the Chesapeake Bay.”
Stephanie Boyles Griffin, a director at Humane Society of the United States, said the destruction of cormorant eggs is unfair and an example of how the birds are still being unfairly persecuted.
“The Humane Society of the United States is strongly opposed to any lethal efforts to control cormorants,” Griffin says. “They’re a native bird. The reason that fishermen and wildlife managers want to manage them at all, using lethal or nonlethal methods, is because of land-use decisions that we as humans have made. We have taken up residence at most of the coastal areas of the Chesapeake Bay, and this is all colonial nesting and shorebird breeding ground.”
Development and erosion are forcing terns and other birds to compete with cormorants for a shrinking number of secluded waterfront nesting sites. People are trying to pick the winners and losers in nature’s competition. And the misunderstood black bird is still paying a fatal price.
