Foam Lake Birding No. 180

FOAM LAKE BIRDING

No. 180

            The swarms of warblers are considerably reduced but berry eating flickers have gone from one male to at least three.  The Tree Swallows and Purple Martins have been long gone but the Barn Swallows still linger.  An interesting note is that there were actually two Barn Swallows' nest on our neighbour's house and not one as previously reported.  There was one on the north peak as well as the south.  We also spotted Ruby Crowned Kinglets and Least Flycatchers in our yard.  Both are local nesters but, like Downey and Hairy Woodpeckers, tend not to show up in our yards during breeding season.   Unlike the woodpeckers they do migrate. 

            While driving down rural roads I noticed an influx of cormorants around various deeper bodies of water especially dugouts.  When stocked with fish dugouts were especially favoured by cormorants for the easy pickings.  Even people in cities with larger yards that had outdoor goldfish ponds were paid visits by the cormorants.  This did not endear them to the people directly affected. 

            As a group cormorants have been reclassified at least three times and taxonomists still are unsure where to place them and so the debate continues.  Eventually DNA testing will probably resolve the issue.  Since ancient times until the seventeenth century it was believed they were related to the crow family and several European countries referred to cormorants as "sea ravens".  In fact the name cormorant might be a contraction from the Latin "corvus marinus" which means sea raven.  In any case a cormorant especially in flight looks remarkably like a crow except for the longish neck and faster wing beat. 

            Except for the Double Crested all cormorants are coastal birds that feed strictly on fish that they catch by diving from the shallows to more than 45 metres deep.  In the past peoples in parts of Asia and the Mediterranean tamed and trained cormorants to fish in much the same way falcons were utilized to catch birds and small mammals.  A ring was put around the cormorant's neck restricting the size of the fish it could swallow.  A small fish would be eaten but a large one would get stuck in the throat and the cormorant would have to get its master to help getting the fish out which the fisherman kept for himself.  It was hoped that the cormorant would catch enough fish for the fisherman before it was full itself and lost interest in fishing.  Fishing with cormorants is still practised in some parts of Asia today. 

            The only cormorant to be found on fresh water is the Double Crested so named because of small tufts of feathers that appear on either side of the head during breeding season which are seldom visible even during breeding season.  (Cormorants with long feathers on their heads are often called 'shags").  One characteristic of the cormorants shared with only one other bird, the Anhinga, is its habit of drying itself out after a swim.   The bird climbs onto a rock or snag near or in the water, faces the sun, and spreads out its wings to expose a greater area and to dry out and warm up more quickly.  This pose reminded early Christians of the cross so the bird was given special status and appeared on the coats of arms of several European countries. 

            This week's picture is of two Double Crested Cormorants perched on rocks at an abandoned water filled gravel pit near Tuffnell.  One of the birds is in typical cormorant pose sunning itself. 

Foam Lake Birding No. 97

FOAM LAKE BIRDING
No. 97
During very wet years, like this year, many small streams that are usually dry by the middle of summer are still running and many have small fish in them. In the 1970s when we lived in Wishart the town was installing a storm sewer part of which was in front of our place. Before the sewer pipes could be laid and the ditch filled in, a stretch of very wet weather followed that delayed work for several weeks. That and the already wet spring resulted in the ditch becoming a stream. Our children and their friends would catch stickleback fish in this ditch and then try to "make" goldfish out of them. Sadly the sticklebacks died within a few days. Since the ditch was not connected to a stream of any kind the source of the fish was a mystery that was never solved. To make matters even more interesting one of my students brought a few sticklebacks to school that he had pulled out of a well in a bucket. Talk about the mysteries of nature.
Anyway, many of our streams and sloughs have sticklebacks in them and this attracts predators such as pelicans. This week I want to cover distant relatives of the pelicans, the cormorants. As a whole cormorants are black or nearly black chicken sized fish eating water birds that look a lot like crows when in flight. In some localities this characteristic has earned them the nickname of sea crows. When swimming they resemble black ducks and when perched they look a little like vultures. Unlike other members of the pelican family cormorants fly with their necks stretched out like a duck or goose. (To the very observant the neck has a slight crook in it.) Cormorants' feathers are not as waterproof as a duck's so after a period of diving after fish the cormorants have to dry their feathers out. They accomplish this by perching on a pole or snag facing the sun and spreading out their wings to let the sun and wind do their work. A very distant but similar looking relative, the Anhinga, also uses this technique. As a side note, in the past Japanese fishers used trained cormorants to catch fish for them. A ring was placed around the cormorant's neck with enough slack to allow the bird to breathe but snug enough to prevent the cormorant from swallowing the freshly caught fish. The fish was then retrieved and the cormorant would dive to catch another.
There are six species of cormorants in North America but only one, the Double Crested, occurs around here and only in the summer time. It is only one of two species that frequent fresh water; the rest are oceanic (pelagic). The double crests that give the species its name are barely evident only on the male and only during the breeding season. Otherwise the males and females are the same.
This week's photo was taken in Texas showing several cormorants sunning themselves on a snag although none have their wings spread out. This picture is actually of Neotropical Cormorants, the other species that frequents fresh water. For reasons that I cannot explain I do not have any pictures of Double Crested Cormorants so I decided to use the pictures of the Neotropical instead. In real life they look very much alike and in a black and white photo they look almost identical. In last week's issue of The Review the photo of Double Crested Cormorants by Sylvia Bolingbroke proves the point. (Compare her photo to the one included in this article). Check with a bird book for the differences between the two keeping in mind that the Neotropical does not occur here.