Cormorants' coat of many colours

Thursday's Guardian Country Diary is about cormorants.

Look at a cormorant's plumage from a distance and it seems as though it's coal-black, but a bit of sunshine makes all the difference.

Bright sunlight glancing off their outstretched wings reveals a bronze iridescence ...




..... but in a more diffuse light there's indigo in the chest and wing feathers....






.... while this juvenile has a hint of bottle green in the crown and tail plumage.

All 'a trick of the light'.

The End of the Pier Show...

Roker pier and lighthouse, at the mouth of the river Wear in Sunderland. A fine place for a stroll on a summer's afternoon like today, with bright sunshine, barely a breath of wind and almost a flat calm sea at low tide. 

A good place to watch seabirds too, like this juvenile cormorant ....

......learning the art of diving for fish. The trick is to push down hard on the water surface with that broad tail, to give the dive a bit of momentum ...

.... and at the third attempt it caught this. It seemed surprised and not quite sure what to do with such a large and lively catch, which looks like it might be a an eel-pout .........

.... which are notoriously slimy ... which may be why the bird struggled with its grip, dropping and re-catching its prey twice ...

.... before it managed to get the fish's head into its throat and started to swallow it ....

.... which didn't go according to plan. The fish must have been putting up a fight inside the bird's throat because the cormorant regurgitated it ...

.... dunked it in the sea a few more times, then swallowed it again ...

 ....and this time the catch stayed down. Must be still wriggling though, judging from that thoughtful expression on the cormorant's face.

No such problems for the terns which fished alongside the pier.

The calm, sunlit water was remarkably clear, so you could see vast shoals of small fish swimming in unison above the sandy bottom. There must have been well over a 1000 in this shoal but the terns ignored them, even through they flew over them many times ..... maybe they were too small to merit a plunge-dive ....

.... or maybe they preferred to catch their fish in deeper water...

Meanwhile, alongside the pier this year's guillemot juveniles were relentlessly pursuing their parents ....

....... adopting a submissive posture .......

.... and calling incessantly for food .....

..... which must have been easy to spot by peering down into the sunlit water like this.....

...... and the water was so clear that I could watch the birds 'flying' underwater in pursuit of prey.

Drying Wings and Wet Feet

On our walk along the coast today from the National Glass Centre in Sunderland to Seaburn we passed several cormorants near St. Peter's marina ...... 

...... drying their waterlogged wings at the end of a fishing session.

Due to their superior fishing skills cormorants tend to be unpopular with fishermen but along this stretch of coast they are the subject of some fine examples of public art, including an impressive series of metal sculptures and ...

... this very attractive weather vane on the bank of the river, where ..... 

..... this red-throated diver in winter plumage was also out fishing in the River Wear estuary.

These sanderling, perched on a rock off Roker beach, were just about to be displaced by the incoming tide and I was concentrating so hard on taking their photograph that I didn't notice the threat until the waves were lapping around my ankles. That's not the first time it's happened either - one of the perils of seashore photography. I completed the rest of the walk with squelching shoes..... 

Cormorants

"On the land they are dull and heavy" wrote the Reverend F.O. Morris B.A., describing cormorants in his A History of British Birds (3rd. edn., 1891). They may be heavy but this prolific (and often unreliable) 19th. century author and naturalist can't have looked too closely at cormorants because their feathers have a very attractive blue-green-purple iridescence when their plumage catches the light at the right angle. 

These birds, looking very satisfied with their morning's fishing, were roosting in the trees on the banks of the Tyne between Wylam and Newburn today.  Morris describes how cormorants were once tamed in Britain for fishing, mentioning that "King James the First was fond of this pursuit, and had a 'Master of the Royal Cormorants' ". Apparently the birds were kept in ponds at the site of the present Houses of Parliament. Morris personally watched tame cormorants kept by a Captain Salvin catching trout for their master in a small beck near his home in Yorkshire, but doesn't mention how the birds were persuaded not to swallow the fish; I imagine their throats were constricted with a ligature. 

The fishing skills of cormorants have long been resented by anglers, who still regard them with murderous intent. Morris mentions that shooting cormorants was once considered something of a challenge, even when they were only swimming rather than flying."In the old days of flint-and-steel guns," he wrote, "the first flash used to send the cormorant down, so quick was his eye, and even now it is difficult to get within shot." Cormorants may be adept at eluding shooters, but one unfortunate bird didn't see an express train coming. Morris relates the tale of a bird that "was struck down and killed by the funnel of the engine of an express train, as it was crossing the Lock of Spynie, in Elginshire, on 20th. of September 1852", which may well be the first account of a bird killed by the new-fangled technology of a steam train.

Cormorants: made from girders

Keith, who blogs here, has just posted some fine photos of cormorants, which put me in mind of this interesting piece of ornithologically-inspired public art called 'Taking Flight' by Craig Knowles, that you can see at the North Dock Marina at Sunderland, near the mouth of the River Wear.

It takes the form of five girders embedded upright in the quayside, on a pier that juts out into the river, that gradually morph from solid steel to a cormorant about to lift-off from its perch.....

.... and pays tribute to Sunderland's shipbuilding industrial heritage and the cormorants that still perch near the end of the quay and fish in the river.

If you visit this website you can play with a 360 degree panorama which shows the whole series of scultures in context

Anybody know of any further pieces of ornithologically-inspired public art?