The Devil's Cormorant: A Natural History
Richard J. King
Language: English
Pages: 360
ISBN: 1611686997
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
Behold the cormorant: silent, still, cruciform, and brooding; flashing, soaring, quick as a snake. Evolution has crafted the only creature on Earth that can migrate the length of a continent, dive and hunt deep underwater, perch comfortably on a branch or a wire, walk on land, climb up cliff faces, feed on thousands of different species, and live beside both fresh and salt water in a vast global range of temperatures and altitudes, often in close proximity to man. Long a symbol of gluttony, greed, bad luck, and evil, the cormorant has led a troubled existence in human history, myth, and literature. The birds have been prized as a source of mineral wealth in Peru, hunted to extinction in the Arctic, trained by the Japanese to catch fish, demonized by Milton in Paradise Lost, and reviled, despised, and exterminated by sport and commercial fishermen from Israel to Indianapolis, Toronto to Tierra del Fuego. In The Devil’s Cormorant, Richard King takes us back in time and around the world to show us the history, nature, ecology, and economy of the world’s most misunderstood waterfowl.
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continues. “I’m not naming names. They had too much to drink, so I heard. And they spilled the beans.” Throughout the Great Lakes and on the inland bodies of fresh water in the bordering provinces and states, sport fishermen catch a large variety of fish species. Anglers cast lines from the shore, they push off in their own small boats, and they pay to go out on larger boats with charter captains who know the area and who will, if you want, bait your lines, teach you how to reel in the fish, and
Britain, written by Major General Henry Palmer of the Royal Engineers. Palmer’s description of the practice on the Nagara River is strikingly similar to how ukai is performed there today. Palmer went on an evening dinner boat. The spectators drank hot tea and ate fruits, sweetmeats, and eel. He described first seeing the glow of the fires and then the sounds of the cormorant fishermen banging the hulls and shouting to urge on the birds. Palmer wrote: “Next appear the forms of the boats and the
of blue of a pied cormorant, by a talented local artist in New Zealand. Several ancient Chinese and Japanese paintings capture the essence of cormorants with just a few melancholic brushstrokes. Many countries have issued indigenous-bird stamps with cormorants: the cormorant stamps from Serbia and Palau are especially appealing. It is easy to find stunning photographs of cormorants in books or online, but they usually lack a timeless quality. I’ve seen bronze cormorant sculptures at tourist
specific niche. They will thrive and look totally different again in a million or a hundred million years. Maybe a few hundred of them, randomly chosen, will end up on a cruise ship and waddle onto an Indonesian island. And thrive. Vonnegut provides a surprisingly happy ending to Galápagos—a new, more content Homo sapiens is living a peaceful, fish-eating, cormorantlike existence, albeit incapable of any larger sense of self or soul. They King - Devil's Cormorant.indb 167 Galápagos Islands
to cormorants can barely walk. They can barely swim. They’re long and black and evolved only to soar and p lummet-dive in the air. They gather some of their food from scaring other seabirds into 172 King - Devil's Cormorant.indb 172 t h e d ev i l’s cor m or a n t 7/1/2013 11:31:24 AM coughing up their recent catch, hence their common name. This might be another advantage of flightlessness for cormorants, to avoid this sort of in-air predation, known as “kleptoparasitism.”59 I had always