Vol. XVIII, 



1919 



] Correspondence. 211 



additional light on the subject of the dietary of the Cormorant." 

 This I consider he has not done, for he has not dissected one single 

 stomach, and relies upon his memory of 1862 for evidence of having 

 seen a single Cormorant with a fish which it could not swallow, 

 and this he admits must have been imprisoned in a pool far from 

 the deep sea.— Yours, &c., 5 \ WHITE. 



To the Editors of " The Emu." 



Sirs, — In the October number of The Emu appears an article 

 by Mr. W. T. Forster criticising Capt. White's conclusions as to 

 the food of Cormorants. As I have been associated with Capt. 

 White in this work, I hope you will allow me to make a few remarks 

 on the subject. Mr. Forster rightly states that it is " unsafe to 

 generalize from a single case," and yet forms his opinion on one 

 observation made more than fifty years ago. The incidents he 

 mentions, of seeing Cormorants diving in water known to contain 

 fish, are not observations — they are pure suppositions, for there 

 is no proof that the birds were capturing marketable fish, or even 

 any fish at all. It is on so-called observations such as these that 

 the Cormorants are condemned by so many people. Capt. White 

 does not " generalize from a single case." We have now dissected 

 and carefuUy examined the stomach contents of over 60 

 Cormorants taken from five different localities — all good fishing 

 grounds, and not from localities where marketable fish were 

 scarce, as Mr. Forster, without any evidence whatever, supposes 

 to be the case. Of course, Mr. Forster is mistaken in stating 

 that Cormorants devour their food under water. Neither Cor- 

 morants or any other birds, except Penguins, are able to do this ; 

 they are obliged to come to the surface to swallow even the 

 smallest fish. Neither Capt. White nor anyone of ordinary 

 intelligence suggests that Cormorants consciously discriminate 

 between marketable and unmarketable fish ; but we do contend 

 that they discriminate between those fish which are easily caught 

 and those which are not. The former consist of slow-swimming 

 fish, which depend more upon their harmony with their sur- 

 roundings than upon their swiftness for their safety, and it is for 

 this reason that Cormorants fish almost invariably over weedy 

 bottoms, where such fish are found. Very few of such fish are 

 of marketable kinds ; the only exception I know of is a fish called 

 locally the rock flathead, which lives on weedy bottoms. It is 

 probably an edible fish, but does not come into the market because 

 the fishermen do not find it worth their while to fish in such places. 

 It is not the same as the sand flathead {Platycephalus fuscus), an 

 example of which we have not yet found in a Cormorant's stomach. 

 Cormorants do occasionally catch edible fish, for last year, in the 

 mud under a Cormorants' rookery at Port Broughton, I found 

 one garfish among hundreds of thousands of disgorged fish. At 



