Neighborhood Cormorants

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At the top is John James Audubon's 1831 depiction of a Florida cormorant, and below it is a photo I took last week, just down the street.

In my last posting, I showed views of my back yard. In this view from my roof, one can see the estuary, and beyond it Little Bayou, which leads into Tampa Bay. Since this photograph was taken, mangroves have been planted along the estuary, and they've grown to almost block my ground level view of the water. While that's a disappointment, mangroves are vital to the food chain of marine life, thus insuring that birds like the cormorant will stick around.

And so if I want to watch the cormorants, I walk about 1½ blocks to this seawall and have a seat.

Cormorants are interesting to watch. They will swim in the water to catch fish, but unlike other seabirds, their feathers don't repel water in the same way, and they will become water-logged.

After a dip or plunge in the water, cormorants need to dry off, and therefore spend much of their daytime roosting between meals. That's why the fellow in the photo below is spreading his wings.

In Asia, cormorants are used to help fishermen catch their haul, and for an extraordinarily beautiful image of that, I direct you to a National Geographic page, here.
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