Richard J. King - The Devils Cormorant: A Natural History

FIGURE 1. Gdo, Cormorant Fishing Boats on the Nearby Nagara River, by Ando Hiroshige and Keisai Eisen, c. 1840. Courtesy Williams College

FIGURE 2. Junji Yamashita fishing with his cormorants on the Nagara River, Japan. Courtesy Kazuto Hino, Gifu Convention and Visitors Bureau

FIGURE 3. A young Frenchman holds a trained cormorant, named Tobie, in a similar fashion to a falcon. This is the frontispiece to La Pche au Cormoran by Le Couteulx de Canteleu (1870). Courtesy of Williams College

FIGURE 4. Irene Mazzocchi of the NYSDEC collects a pellet between double-crested cormorant nests on Little Galloo Island, New York.

FIGURE 5. Sport fisherman Ron Ditch, one of the leaders of the men who slaughtered thousands of cormorants on Little Galloo Island, New York, holds a wood carving of a double-crested cormorant that he made over a decade afterward.

FIGURE 6. A raven-like cormorant is Satan perched on the Tree of Life to illustrate the first letter of book 4 in John Miltons Paradise Lost, 1720, designed by Louis Cheron. Courtesy of Connecticut College

FIGURE 7. In a fable by Jean de la Fontaine, illustrated by Gustave Dor in 1868, an old cormorant deceives all the fish in a pond in order to eat them one by one. Courtesy Connecticut College

FIGURE 8. Blue-eyed shags building nests near Port Lockroy, Antarctica. Ralph Lee Hopkins, National Geographic

FIGURE 9. The crests on the double-crested cormorant appear a few weeks a year while the bird is breeding. West of the Rockies the crests can be all white or, as on this bird on East Sand Island on the Columbia River, a mixture of black and white feathers. Bird Research Northwest

FIGURE 10. Research technicians band double-crested cormorant chicks after capturing them at night from the tunnels on East Sand Island at the mouth of the Columbia River. Adam Peck-Richardson, Bird Research Northwest

FIGURE 11. Specimens of guanay cormorants at the Bird Group in Tring, England. Note the middle label from a bird collected by Captain Robert FitzRoy in Valparaiso, Chile. The label on the right is a specimen from the Chinchas collected by the Scottish naturalist H. O. Forbes, who recorded five million birds on Isla Centro.

FIGURE 12. An engraving of the full skeletons of a crane (left), a starling (upper right), and a great cormorant (right) by Volcher Coeiter, 1575. Courtesy of Connecticut College

FIGURE 13. In England the Angling Trust printed these postcards to put in local clubs and tackle shops to encourage sport fishermen to mail them in to their representatives in Parliament. The organization is concerned about the great cormorants impact on recreational fish stocks.

FIGURE 14. The extinct spectacled cormorant as painted in this lithograph by Joseph Wolf, 1869. There is no known illustration of this bird alive.

FIGURE 15. A pair of flightless cormorants on Fernandina Island, Galpagos, Ecuador. Note the difference in size between the much larger male (left) and the female this extent of sexual dimorphism is unique among cormorants. Ingo Arndt, Minden Pictures, National Geographic

FIGURE 16. Flightless Cormorant, by Heather Carr. Original is in color, acrylic paint and mixed media, 24 inches by 36 inches, 2012. Note the two chicks stenciled to the lower right, beneath Im not going anywhere. Heather Carr; heatherunderground.com

FIGURE 17. Brady Thompson uses a shovel to pick up a double-crested cormorant that he just shot flying above this catfish aquaculture pond near Belzoni, Mississippi

FIGURE 18. Tens of thousands of guanay cormorants pack a slope of Isla San Lorenzo, Peru; photographer and date unknown.

FIGURE 19. In this Moche image drawn from a ceramic design, the god Quismique traps one of the guanay cormorants to help him travel under the sea. From Gerdt Kutscher, Nordperuanische Keramik: figrlich verzierte Gefsse der Frh-Chimu (Berlin: Gebr. Mann Verlag, 1954), plate 62.

FIGURE 20. Staff member Marguerite du Preez cares for a Cape cormorant by giving the chick a fish formula with a syringe at SANCCOB in Cape Town, South Africa. Courtesy of Nola Parsons and SANCCOB

FIGURE 21. A crche of double-crested cormorants on Gates Island, Connecticut.