'*i 



The Baird Cormorant 



our smaller coastal islands are an 

 especial delight to her, while some 

 of the sheer walls upon our mainland 

 promontories permit fairly gratifying 

 opportunities for study. Indeed, there 

 is scarcely an islet along our entire 

 Pacific Coast, from the Santa Barbara 

 Islands to Norton Sound, which does 

 not boast from one to thirty pairs of 

 these venturesome birds (or the doubt- 

 fully larger form, P. p. resplendens) ; 

 while the larger islands, like the 

 Farallons, and the more inaccessible 

 promontories, harbor hundreds. In 

 an ideal situation, like that furnished 

 by Fuca's Pillar, off Cape Flattery, 

 these shags range themselves in serried 

 ranks along impossible ledges, looking 

 collectively like black bottles on a 

 druggist's shelves, or, more elegantly, 

 and at closer quarters, like ebony 

 statuettes on marble pedestals. 



Cormorants plunge into the wild- 

 est waters as fearlessly as sea-lions, 

 and they carry on their fishing opera- 

 tions about the shoulders of booming 

 reefs which humans dare not ap- 

 proach. Baird's Cormorants appear to be quite the most intrepid of 

 their kind ; and if certain accounts of northern fishermen, recorded 

 by Mr. C. I. Clay, 1 of Eureka, are to be believed, they have been taken 

 in eighty fathoms of water. Mr. Clay himself saw Brandt Cormorants 

 enmeshed in nets set at twenty fathoms, and was told that the larger 

 species was never taken below forty. Wings are used for propulsion 

 as well as the powerful full-webbed feet. The nostrils, moreover, of 

 all adult cormorants are permanently closed, so that we have here per- 

 haps, at least among those who can also fly, the world's champion diver. 

 After luncheons, which occur quite frequently in the cormorant day, 

 the birds love to gather on some low-lying reef, just above the reach of 

 the waves, and devote the intervening hours to that most solemn func- 

 tion of life, digestion. There is evidence that the birds discuss oceanic 

 politics on these occasions — the benevolent assimilation of a twelve- 



1 Condor, XIII., p. 138. 



Taken in Washington 



Photo by the Author 



BAIRD CORMORANTS AT NEST 



1957 



