Double-crested Cormorant

September 25 2019.  Valley Inn, Burlington, ON. Leaning, in the manner of an idling wastrel, over the railing of a narrow bridge I was gazing at the thick red-brown waters of Grindstone Creek below when this Double-crested Cormorant popped to the surface right before my eyes.  In its billhook beak it held a wildly protesting Brown Bullhead (a species of catfish).

Catching a fish is one thing (and very tricky I should think in turbid waters like this) but swallowing it quite another and the Bullhead was having nothing of it. The cormorant’s task was to turn it 90 degrees, very much alive and flapping, in order to drop it head-first down the bird’s throat. Here it makes a risky attempt to flip it around.

All bets are on the cormorant getting its meal: it’s done it many times, its bill is such that it doesn’t allow for quick escapes, it’s throat will easily accommodate the fish once turned and time is on its side. The fish’s problems, on the other hand, were overwhelming: Out of water and rather too securely in the bird’s mouth.  Its only hope was to flap enough to wriggle free as the cormorant wrestled with the 90-degree flip.  We were pretty sure how it would all turn out as the cormorant left and disappeared around a bend in the river.

I admit to a general ambivalence about cormorants. Other than they are fish-catchers par-excellence, it is hard to pinpoint anything particularly engaging about them. Their appetite for fish doesn’t bother me, but they can be a bit much in the sort of numbers we see them.

There were other interesting birds today but the Double-crested Cormorant was my Bird of the Day and the Brown Bullhead gets Fish of the Day.