SOUTH AFRICA
She is the first bird I have cried over.
ELAINE HAYES,
director of Living Coasts, speaking about the death of the first bank cormorant born in captivity
Nola Parsons was born in Zimbabwe but raised in Johannesburg, South Africa. After earning a degree in veterinary medicine, young Dr. Parsons moved to London and worked for a few years in a small animal clinic, spending most of her time neutering dogs and cats. During her free time she backpacked around Europe. She spent a month on one of the islands of Tonga helping with research on fruit bats. She worked for a time on an organic farm in southern Spain. During her travels, she became a vegan, in part because of the ethics of the matter and her larger environmental concerns.
Eventually Parsons grew weary of the weather in England. Her wanderlust mostly satisfied, she decided to move back to South Africa. She wanted to explore projects in conservation biology rather than work in a private veterinary practice. So she found a position at the South African Foundation for the Conservation of Coastal Birds, known officially and colloquially as SANCCOB. This nonprofit organization is in a quiet northern suburb of Cape Town. Its mission is to conserve and protect South Africa’s seabirds through education and awareness, training, seabird rehabilitation, and contributions to broader research.
Parsons had first learned about SANCCOB in 2000 because of the oil spill of the bulk ore carrier Treasure in Table Bay. The center treated and released an improbable 19,000 African penguins. Even in London, she could not help but hear what an overwhelming yet enormously successful undertaking it all was.1
Parsons signed up as a volunteer at SANCCOB when she moved back to South Africa, which soon led to a full-time position as the rehabilitation manager. The job required that she help organize the progression of returning the birds to health. She kept track of all the paperwork and also did some of the initial hands-on care of the birds. She did this while working with a steady stream of eager but largely unskilled local and international volunteers, known as “vollies,” who were generally surprised to learn that most of the job is trying to keep the facility clean.
For her first few months at SANCCOB she studied about seabird physiology and acclimated to how everything functioned. She learned the names of the various pools, the holding pens, the logistics and systems, and she picked up a few new unexpected skills as they came up, such as how to repair the aviary netting or fix the high-pressure water hose. She grew used to the pervasive smell of guano and fish. Her friends outside of work said she always smelled of it—even after she had showered and changed clothes.
When she first started, Parsons was amazed at just how busy the rehabilitation center was every day. Birds were constantly arriving, the phone always ringing. She would later calculate that for her first two years at SANCCOB, without any significant oil spills, the center took in an average of over four birds each day.2
Even though penguins have always composed the majority of the admitted birds at SANCCOB, as well as dominated the center’s public mission and outreach, it was the cormorants that Nola Parsons first learned how to handle and rehabilitate. Four different cormorant species nest and fish off the Atlantic coast of South Africa and Namibia, and a fifth cormorant lives in the local marshes and inland ponds. These are the bank cormorant (Phalacrocorax neglectus), the Cape cormorant (P. capensis), the crowned cormorant (P. coronatus), the great “white-breasted” cormorant (P. carbo lucidus), and the more inland long-tailed “reed” cormorant (P. africanus).3 On a few occasions all five of the cormorant species have been listed on the center’s master whiteboard chart, which catalogs all the seabirds currently admitted.
Aside from the one penguin and five cormorant species, a handful of other common coastal seabirds breed in the region, including gannets, gulls, terns, and pelicans. In addition, because of Cape Town’s geography and the wind patterns, all manner of straggler birds find themselves at SANCCOB, such as albatross and skuas. During the first year that Parsons was there, the crew of a deep-sea tugboat brought in a gravely ill red-billed tropicbird, a species rare to this coastline. The animal had landed on deck and never had the strength to fly away, even when the boat entered the harbor.
As time went on, Parsons earned a PhD in zoology at the University of Cape Town. She then worked for a year and a half out on the islands with South Africa’s coastal management team and returned to SANCCOB in the position of veterinarian and researcher. Now a dozen years after first volunteering, she is in charge of several short-term and long-term initiatives, such as running the African Penguin Chick Bolstering Project. She also coordinates the Seabird Health Survey, which includes a long-term research study on the parasites found in seabirds’ blood.
These days at SANCCOB, Parsons spends less time directly with bird rehabilitation. She is quick to point out all the skills and hard work of all the other staff and vollies. Most of her days are spent in the lab or doing autopsies. And although she works primarily with penguins, and her PhD thesis was on African black oystercatchers, it is the cormorants, especially the endangered bank cormorants, that remain her favorites. Cormorants were the first birds she worked with, and since then she has been active in programs to assist this struggling local bank cormorant population.
Echoing the sentiment of artist Anna Kirk-Smith about the extinct spectacled cormorant, Nola Parsons tells me: “I love the bank cormorants because they are a little bit big and stupid and clumsy—and I always support the underdog!”4
The largest and most prestigious institutions for bird research in the Southern Hemisphere are a short distance from SANCCOB. Based at the University of Cape Town, the Percy Fitzpatrick Institute of African Ornithology, known for fun as “the Fitztitute,” and the university’s Animal Demography Unit both have active, rigorous slates of research projects, courses, and scholars studying all types of birds. Parsons earned her PhD through the Animal Demography Unit. Elisa Goya from Peru came here to UCT to study and collaborate with researchers. Robert Prŷs-Jones, before he took the position at Tring, zoomed along the Fitztitute’s hallways for five years as a lecturer and researcher.
In the late 1980s, when Prŷs-Jones was here, biologists conducted some fascinating research looking at historic and current guano deposition and how it might reveal fish populations and the birds’ effect on these stocks. The researchers compared the Humboldt Current off Peru to the Benguela Current off southwestern Africa.5 This comparison makes a lot of sense because though the Benguela system is smaller geographically, the two upwelling regions are exceptionally similar. Strong, seasonally shifting southerly winds drive both currents, mixing productive cold waters from the ocean bottom past chains of small, coastal islands. In the Benguela Current, the upwelling sustains dizzying schools of surface-feeding anchovies and pilchards.
Fishermen in both regions have complained about seabirds damaging the fish populations.6 In 1955, for example, a South African wildlife manager wrote in a government paper that the coastal cormorants “kill for the lust of killing even after their voracious appetites have been satisfied.”7 Yet the research from the Fitztitute suggests that seabirds in both currents have had little impact on stocks over the years, especially in comparison to the harvest by humans.8 As on the coast of Peru, commercial overfishing in the region of the Benguela Current dramatically diminished these fish populations in the 1960s and 1970s. This in turn precipitously reduced the seabird colonies that had been feeding on these fish and that had once lived on the offshore islands in a population, for cormorants alone, of over a million.9
The guano islands of the Benguela system hosted in decreasing order of population the African penguin (Spheniscus demersus), the Cape cormorant, and the Cape gannet (Morus capensis).10 This Cape cormorant is actually quite similar to the guanay cormorant physiologically and in general ecology. Cape cormorants are frequently admitted to SANCCOB, usually as weak juveniles.
In the mid-nineteenth century the Swedish naturalist and explorer Charles Andersson—after surviving a rhinoceros goring and having his kneecap blasted apart by native tribesmen—was one of the first Europeans to carefully observe and describe the Benguela seabirds. His account of the Cape cormorant in the early 1860s sounds like Audubon’s description of the vast flights of double-crested cormorants on the Mississippi River and Robert Cushman Murphy’s account of endless strings of guanay cormorants: “At some seasons of the year they may be counted not merely by tens or even by hundreds of thousands, but by millions: their numbers, in fact, exceed all computation; for it is no unusual thing to see a deep unbroken line of these birds winging their way for two, or even three, consecutive hours to or from their feeding grounds.”11
Andersson observed: “During the nesting-season large numbers [of Cape cormorants] are to be found on almost every suitable rock and islet from the river Cunéné [Namibia’s northern border] to Table Bay, in which situations, next to the Gannet and Penguin, this species is the principal depositor of guano.”12
Dutch merchants seem to have mined the islands of the Benguela Current on a small scale for guano as early as the 1660s.13 In the mid-nineteenth century, right after deliveries from the Chincha Islands sparked the guano rush in Europe and the United States, merchants quickly and aggressively mined the islands off southwest Africa. Elisa Goya feels right at home on this bald, dry African coast, though there is a bit more wind and rain here to erode and wash away the guano. In part because of this rainfall, the African deposits were never as large as on the Peruvian islands. The white-gloved European chemists determined that this mixture of penguin, cormorant, and gannet droppings was not quite as effective a fertilizer as that of the Chinchas. Nevertheless, British mariners secretively, then contentiously, claimed the African islands, trying to get a slice of the high demand sparked by the Peruvian product.14
Almost immediately after the guano rush began out of the Chincha Islands, mariners, primarily Brits, cleared Ichaboe Island of about two hundred thousand tons of guano in less than a year and a half.15 Stories go that there was such a rush on this island that sailors were murdering each other with pickaxes. In 1844 an American mariner described three hundred English ships and five American ships at anchor beside Ichaboe. In addition to all these sailors, two thousand more laborers from Cape Town had been brought over to work at the same time, all chopping at an island that is no more than eighteen hundred feet (550 m) long.16 The ship Ann, mentioned earlier—the one that exploded after running aground because of the combustible properties of the stored feces—was in fact returning with a hold brimming over with Ichaboe guano.17
Though the guano resource off southwestern Africa was quickly exhausted, smaller-scale domestic mining has continued into the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. In the early 1930s, for example, an entrepreneurial carpenter built a guano platform off Namibia over partially submerged, and appropriately named, Bird Rock. After several years of work, his platform—a massive wood deck ingeniously built over the rocks—measured about 183,000 square feet (17,000 sq m). The operation connected with the platform eventually turned a handsome, consistent profit and supported each season hundreds of thousands of nesting birds, which included likely almost a quarter of a million Cape cormorants. The product, especially since it was not mixed with any sand or dirt, fetched an exceptionally high price.18
Bird Rock is still being harvested. Until quite recently a company named Guano Green Fertilizers continued to scrape small deposits off Ichaboe, other purpose-built coastal platforms, and perhaps another island or two. They ship the product to countries such as Germany and Belgium for the organic market.19
Although the Cape Cormorant has been by far the most abundant cormorant in the Benguela region, Nola Parson’s favorite, the bank cormorant, also seems to have been historically an active breeder here, too.20
In 1854, just a few steps ahead of Charles Andersson, the German naturalist Johan Wahlberg traveled to the region. Between preparing ape skins and shooting flamingos for food, Wahlberg became the first European naturalist to describe the bank cormorant.21
On June 22, Wahlberg secured a trip aboard one of the most famous American clippers ships: “My trip to Walfisch [Walvis] Bay on board The Witch of the Wave was a slow business, because the vessel took on a cargo of guano on the way. While this was going on all my things had to remain on deck, and though they were covered they were completely drifted over by the fine guano dust. One compensation for this unpleasantness was that I had time to collect various things from the little islands along the coast.”
Wahlberg and his team killed fifty fur seals. He recorded (and often collected) penguins, oystercatchers, gannets, grebes, skuas, and terns. And he found four different kinds of cormorants. “Two species of Graculus [Phalacrocorax] seemed to me possibly new,” he scribbled. “But I have no time to describe it now.”22
Later, Wahlberg explained that his newly observed bank cormorant is “tolerably frequent off the coast of Western South Africa, such as Possession, Halifax, Ichaboe, &c.”23 (His other new cormorant was the crowned cormorant, one of the “micro cormorants.”) Unfortunately Professor Wahlberg did not make it back to his European halls of sciences to enjoy the ribbons of his discoveries. He was trampled by an angry elephant.24 But the name that he prophetically assigned the new bank cormorant, neglectus, Latin for “neglected,” has remained.25
The bank cormorant is a large, relatively stocky bird. It has an entirely black face—no colored orbital ring or yellow-orange gular pouch, just all black. Both the male and female when in breeding plumage have a few white filoplumes and a white rump patch, but otherwise they are entirely black from crest to toe. To compensate, the bank cormorant’s bicolored eye is phenomenal: unique among the cormorants. It can only be appreciated up close or seen with a powerful lens. The iris is a lovely honey-orange color—Wahlberg described it as “ochre-yellow”—which then has an emerald-green lower crescent within the iris. The pupil is black.
The “bankies,” as many at SANCCOB call them, rarely fish farther than five or six nautical miles out from the shoreline. Less interested in the large schools of anchovies and pilchards that dominate the offshore range and diet of the more prolific Cape cormorants, the bank cormorants feed more on gobies and prefer to hunt in the beds of kelp, eating local fish called blennies and klipfish. Studies have found that about a fifth of the bank cormorant’s diet is also invertebrates, such as spiny lobster, crab, and octopus.26 Similar to the Galápagos flightless in a few aspects, the bank cormorant is a heavier, weaker flier than other cormorants. The bank has evolved a more muscular lower jaw, presumably better adapted to probing around rocky bottoms for this type of prey. The bank cormorant can catch a wider diversity of species in a smaller range than the other four local cormorants—each of which has a slightly different underwater niche along this coast of southwestern Africa.27
Along with the Pitt shag and the Chatham shag, as mentioned earlier, the bank cormorants are at a genuine risk of going the way of the spectacled cormorant. The endangered bank cormorant nests at about forty-five rookeries.28 In total today there are an estimated 3,000 breeding pairs of bank cormorants—down from a total of some 7,600 pairs in the early 1980s.29 What is especially challenging is that 75 percent of the bank cormorants live on just two fragile island sites off Namibia: Ichaboe Island and Mercury Island.30 When a rare bank cormorant is brought into SANCCOB, it is usually from Robben Island, which—though home to only about an average of one hundred pairs—is one of the largest South African colonies of these birds.31 Nola Parsons can see Robben Island in Table Bay from the beach nearest to the rehabilitation center. It is better known as the old prison island that held Nelson Mandela for almost two decades. It is an Alcatraz-like tourist attraction now. (“Alcatraz,” you might like to know, meant pelican, gannet, or cormorant to the early Spanish explorers.)
A variety of factors probably have led to the demise of the bank cormorant. Their island rookeries were historically disturbed for the guano harvest, especially Ichaboe. Their populations have been plagued by human development, introduction of mammalian predators, oil spills, and, perhaps most significantly, the movements and diminishment of their sources of food likely due to overfishing and climate change. These include especially the kelp-dwelling fish species, the spiny lobster, and the pelagic goby.32 To a lesser extent, predation on eggs and chicks by gulls and even pelicans has been a problem for breeding bank cormorants. And if that were not all enough, the adult and young bank cormorants are often chomped up by fur seals and the occasional great white shark.33
Usually it is a member of the public strolling the beach or one of the government or conservation workers on one of the islands who calls the rehabilitation center about a sick or injured bird. If the bird is not oiled, the most common observation is that the bird looks drunk. It isn’t flying normally, it can’t hold up its wings, or the bird is stumbling around or just sitting in a place or manner unusual for a wild animal. So a staff member drives out, catches the bird with a net, and transports it in a ventilated box, not unlike those in which dogs and cats are carried around. Once back at SANCCOB, the bird is weighed while in the box, and then a staff member gives the animal an introductory evaluation.
Nola Parsons says that when a bird is stressed and sick it gets sedate and silent. A healthy seabird, on the other hand, will not calmly let you handle it. Regardless, you must be confident and firm. The birds seem to know when someone experienced is caring for them. The standard uniform for the staff is a T-shirt, a pair of oilskin fisherman’s style bib trousers, and waterproof boots. When handling birds, staff members wear neoprene gloves and arm guards up to the elbow.
A cormorant will quickly dart out its neck and peck with its sharply hooked beak. As Megan Gensler was taught on East Sand Island, cormorants go right for people’s eyes, a unique behavior among the seabirds at SANCCOB. New staff and volunteers are often caught off-guard because they get accustomed to penguins, which do not have the ability to swiftly uncoil their necks or, as Parsons calls it, have “the strike distance.” The only time Parsons has been injured by a cormorant at SANCCOBwas when she did not properly instruct a vollie on how to hold the bird. She and the new person were working on the animal together, when the cormorant jabbed Parsons’s eyelid. “A really good wound,” Parsons tells me. “But luckily no damage to my eye itself.”
(Parsons did get bit once by two cormorants at the same time when she was out at one of the colonies. She is embarrassed about this now, because it was improper form and judgment, but she was in a rush and carrying a bird under each arm. She tripped backward over a rock. Though she held on to the two birds, the cormorants pecked her face during the tumble.)
If Parsons is looking at a cormorant that has just been admitted at SANCCOB, she brings the bird to the intensive care unit. She learned long ago that cormorants are more likely to relax if they have their feet supported, so she keeps this in mind when she takes the cormorant out of the box. She holds the cormorant’s beak firmly with one hand as she sits on the edge of a chair while supporting the bird’s feet with the other hand. She puts the cormorant between her legs, transferring the bird’s feet to rest on her calves. With her knees, she holds its wings firmly against its body.
Once the cormorant is secure, Parsons fingers through the feathers for any obvious wounds, broken bones, oil residue, or parasites. On one of the bird’s legs, she secures a temporary tag of waterproof tape with a number. Then she leads a long tube attached to a syringe down into the cormorant’s throat. She squeezes in a portion of electrolyte solution, similar to a sports drink. She opens the bird’s beak again and inserts with her fingers half of a deworming pill.
That done, Parsons normally places the cormorant in a clean, towel-lined crate. She hopes the animal will relax while she fills out a card. Parsons writes down what she has given the bird and the reason for admittance. She grades its general initial health, what they call “habitus.”
Typically, a cormorant will get fluids for the rest of the day and perhaps a mild “fish smoothie” enriched with vitamins. (See figure 20.) For the night, the cormorant will get an infrared lamp and a shade-cloth pen to keep it warm and help it feel safer.
The truth is that most cormorants of any species, by the time they arrive at SANCCOB, are not in a position to survive. If a cormorant does makes it through the night, however, Parsons will take a blood test for pathogens. She will conduct a more extensive evaluation to see how best to rehabilitate the bird and try to get it right back out there as soon as it’s behaving normally and has passed a few basic health tests.
Over the decades, the long-term staff at SANCCOB has observed cormorants roosting and swimming at the rehabilitation center beside a variety of other seabird species native to the Benguela region. Some of these other birds are closely related to cormorants, such as gannets and pelicans, while others are evolutionary convergent in physiological and behavioral ways, such as penguins and terns. Staff regularly handle wild seabirds, examine them, and at times even hand-raise them from chicks. They observe them in captivity, clean wounds, take blood samples, and conduct autopsies. Thus the SANCCOB staff have a rare firsthand perspective on four traits I want to discuss here, which separate the cormorants from the other sea-birds at the rehabilitation center.
First, and least conspicuously, cormorants lack external nostrils and excrete salt out the roof of their mouth, similar to the other Pelecaniformes. The closed nostrils surely restricts the cormorants’ sense of smell, if they have any at all, but it likely helps them swim underwater more efficiently. In the 1970s an ornithologist set up a canvas blind on one of the man-made guano platforms on the Namibian coast. He observed that the cormorant chicks are born with open external nostrils, but as the chicks grow—and before they enter the water to learn how to swim—these nostrils actually close up.34 The juvenile cormorants then breathe only through their mouths as they mature.
All cormorants have the ability to excrete salt quickly and substantially from their blood, as if they had a second pair of kidneys, enabling them to drink seawater and stay hydrated at proper salinity levels. Cormorants have two large internal glands to do this, which are near each eye. Albatross and petrels, truly pelagic seabirds, have tubes on their beaks to drip the salt out from their nostrils. For cormorants, the salt drains out from within the roof of the mouth, then down two thin channels on either side of their beak.35
A second attribute the SANCCOB staff notes is that the cormorants in particular rely on their tail feathers for flight: “Cormorants need these tail feathers to get liftoff,” Parsons says. “And they struggle to get airborne if their tail feathers are damaged. It seems too that they use their tails for braking and changing directions in the air.” In Japan, the usho used to clip a couple of feathers out of the tail to keep their birds from flying away. They now clip the feathers out of the wing instead, probably for aesthetic reasons.36
A third behavioral trait is what Junji Yamashita and his fellow usho also know very well: cormorants seem to be especially mischievous. Cormorants are curious. They engage in play. This has become evident in particular at SANCCOB, thanks to a few cormorants that have been permanently in residence because of injuries. These birds could no longer survive in the wild. They live in an area of SANCCOB called the “home pen.”
Parsons says: “One of these crowned cormies was called Bobby. That was because she bobbed her head when asking for food. We had another tame one at the time who imprinted on penguins, but didn’t like people. So he was called Evil Bobby.”
Parsons immediately feels bad about this nickname, so she is quick to point out that it was a good bird: it just didn’t care for humans. Evil Bobby even used to affectionately bring nesting materials to the penguins—who didn’t seem to quite know how to respond.
“Cormorants are really inquisitive birds and will stick their heads and necks into any available opening,” Parsons says. “They pick up any small object that they see lying around, so you have to be careful not to leave any cable ties or pens or elastic bands within their reach.”
Bobby and Evil Bobby used to wander around parts of the facility and get underfoot. Bobby liked to sit on people’s shoulders, like a pirate’s parrot. This soon had to be stopped because she was too fond of earrings and occasionally stretched her neck around and struck at the person’s eye—presumably wanting to complete the pirate effect with the need for a patch. These days there is another cormorant at the rehabilitation center who likes to swim underwater to nip at the feet of the penguins and gulls—and then dart away as if hoping to be chased.
I can tell you from personal observation all over the world that wild cormorant chicks at their breeding colonies practice what appears to be simple games, such as tugging a stick, throwing the stick to another, or even a sort of “King of the Hill” on a boulder or a tree limb. Sometimes in the stiff winds just off the Cape of Good Hope the cormorants will soar up and dip and weave in the air, more like gulls or petrels.
“I spent ages watching them fly,” Parsons says. “Not very gracefully, but amazing in that strong wind, especially to be able to land on the cliff face. I do think it looked like these cormorants were having fun.”
The fourth and most common behavior to cormorants that I’ll discuss here is the spreading of their wings. At SANCCOB, the cormorants—whether resident or in the process of being rehabilitated—inevitably spend part of their day at the edge of one of the swimming pools standing still and silent with their wings spread out, at times fanning them slightly. No other bird at the center has this behavior, not even the closely related gannet.
This wing spreading is usually one of the first ways people identify cormorants almost anywhere in the world. The behavior is notorious because it is evocative of a bat or a vampire. Riverside signs and nature guides often explain that cormorants do this to dry their wings because they do not possess the proper oils to waterproof their feathers. All cormorants do, however, have near their tails an oil gland—a uropygial gland—which secretes a waxy substance similar to the material called sebum that mammals have in their hair follicles (and which gives humans acne). Cormorants nibble at the base of their backs to get the sebum and wipe it across their feathers, often spreading it around with the back of their necks. The cormorant’s uropygial gland is as functional as those of other diving birds.37
An important study in the 1960s by A. M. Rijke at the University of Cape Town showed that waterproofing in plumage is not all, if even primarily, about the oil. It is more about the structure of the feathers. Rijke found that the microscopic feather construction in cormorants was different enough from that of other waterbirds, say from ducks, to render their feathers less water repellent.38 Getting wet helps cormorants dive deeper more efficiently by reducing drag and the buoyancy of their hollow bones, their lungs, and that thin layer of trapped air close to their skin that enables them to stay warm in cold temperatures—as we discussed with the blue-eyed shags. In exchange for this adaptation to dive deeper more easily, cormorants must dry their wings occasionally after bouts in the water. Shedding the water weight helps them fly more easily and thermoregulate.
Author and biologist Thor Hansen put it this way: “In this context, the shags and cormorants come off looking rather smart. Rather than unkempt survivors with wet feathers and a crummy preen gland, ornithologists now view them as beautifully adapted to a diving lifestyle. They benefit from the negative buoyancy of soaking, while still keeping their skin and down feathers sealed inside a watertight blanket.”39
This explanation alone, however, is not satisfying enough to rabid cormologists, because it is not complete regarding the wing-spreading behavior. As I mentioned earlier, a few cormorant species do not do the spread-wing thing, such as the blue-eyed shags in Antarctica and the red-legged “chuita” cormorants off Peru. Grebes and loons are deep-diving sea-birds that also can fly, but they do not spread their wings. Some vultures, who do not even swim, will occasionally stand and spread out their wings. And cormorants sometimes stand there and spread their wings in the rain.
In an attempt to account for some of these inconsistencies, numerous alternative or additional explanations have been put forth, some of them by researchers at the University of Cape Town. Perhaps cormorants just spread their wings for balance. Maybe cormorants spread their wings to aid with swallowing and digestion. From observations near Cape Town, one ornithologist in the 1970s hypothesized that long-tailed cormorants might spread their wings to collaboratively advertise foraging success, a sort of flag to the rest of the birds in the flock to signal exactly where the food is.40 Another intriguing study in the 1990s by a French ecologist who later became an honorary research associate at the Fitztitute suggested that cormorants spread their wings to aid thermoregulation, since, if the bird has just been fishing, it has filled its stomach with a significant amount of colder material. His study found that a group of cormorants at a German zoo always spread their wings when given cold fish, but only did so a quarter of the time when given warm fish. The energy to hold up the wings and flap them slightly might warm the body, not unlike how we shiver or run in place when cold.41 (Despite this research, I’ve sometimes wondered if it is actually the other way around in the wild: feathers have insulating properties, and since the birds work so hard swimming underwater, perhaps they actually are spreading their wings to cool their bodies, similar to how an elephant spreads its ears.)
In 2008 a group of researchers at the University of Birmingham tested wing-spreading theories by using specially trained cormorants in a hermetically sealed aviary with high-tech scales and monitors for air and water temperature. They concluded: “Wing-spreading following aquatic feeding appears only to serve a wing-drying function. However, our observation that cormorants may commence wing-spreading when both dry and without having fed previously, suggests that there are further functions of wing-spreading behavior that require investigation.”42
To sum up this behavior, cormorants probably spread their wings to dry off because getting waterlogged helps them fish better—for the same reasons a scuba diver wears a weight belt—but surely this getting wet isn’t great for flying or staying warm afterward. It is not about the oil, but more about the structure of their feathers. Then again, there still must be something else going on with this behavior. No one has quite figured it all out.
“Unfortunately most of the volunteers come for the penguins,” Parsons tells me. “They also like the gannets, because they are beautiful. The rest of the birds are less interesting. I think people don’t react to cormorants in the same way because they’re uniform black and brown. Not eye-catching. I also think the vollies are scared of handling the cormorants, because these birds are usually weak when they come in and they die so easily in rehab.”
Parson continues: “I know the education officer always points out to visiting groups how the cormorants spread their wings. But I don’t see too many people that interested in them. But I do think that when the vollies get to see the behavior and playfulness of the cormorants, then they grow to love them!”
Herman Melville in 1851 used the cormorants of South Africa to portend disastrous events. In Moby-Dick, he wrote of “inscrutable sea-ravens” perching on the stays of his death-bound ship Pequod. Melville’s cormorants added to the dismal, dark tone of foreboding as the ship rounds the Cape of Good Hope, “as though they deemed our ship some drifting, uninhabited craft; a thing appointed to desolation.”43
Over a century later, the Australian poet John Blight wrote the sonnet “Cormorants” (1963). He too perpetuates the evil—even fascist—image of the cormorant in literary imagery. Only in the last lines does Blight hint that there might be some beauty to this bird. Blight suggests that this elegance is not in our aesthetic appreciation but instead more in an understanding of the cormorant’s utility: a Liam O’Flaherty–like recognition, acceptance, of this animal’s dark suitability for its role in nature.
CORMORANTS
The sea has it this way: if you see
cormorants, they are the pattern for the eye.
In the sky, on the rocks, in the water—shags!
To think of them every way: I see them, oily rags
flung starboard from some tramp and washed
onto rocks, flung up by the waves, squashed
into sock-shapes with the foot up; sooty birds
wearing white, but not foam-white; swearing, not words,
but blaspheming with swastika-gesture, wing-hinge to nose:
ugly grotesqueries, all in a shag’s pose.
And beautifully ugly for their being shags,
not partly swans. When the eye searches for rags,
it does not seek muslin, white satin; nor,
for its purpose, does the sea adorn shags more.44
The Southern Africa Foundation for the Conservation of Coastal Birds was founded in 1968 by Althea Louise Burman Westphal. She had been living in Cape Town when there was a large oil spill from the tanker Esso Essen, the first major spill to hit this region. Her daughter volunteered with the local SPCA to treat the oiled penguins, but their facilities were no match. Westphal took about sixty penguins back to her house. She cleaned them three at a time in her bathtub with dish soap and at first filled a trailer with water from a hose for them to swim. As some of the penguins improved, she drove them a couple of times a week in her station wagon to the ocean to practice swimming again. She fed them strips of hake. Westphal was able to rehabilitate a few of them back into the wild. Most died.45
Westphal was moved to action by the experience. She got ornithologists and professors at the university involved, and they helped organize a group of private patrons. Soon Westphal and her new colleagues established what would become SANCCOB. The center is now one of the oldest and best-known seabird rehabilitation facilities. It has an educational program and runs a boat trip for school groups. The small, dedicated staff relies on local volunteers and men and women, often right out of university, who come to work for as long as a year, from places as distant as Brazil and California and China.
Althea Westphal stayed involved with SANCCOB until her death at age seventy-one in 2002. Between 1948 and the grounding of the Treasure in 2000, there have been at least fourteen known spills in the waters of this part of Africa that oiled at the very least 500 seabirds.46 Westphal lived to see the rehabilitation of the 19,000 penguins after the Treasure disaster. But the event must have been bittersweet for her. Today Westphal would not be pleased to see that SANCCOB remains so necessarily busy still. Next to International Seabird Rescue based in California, SANCCOB is probably the busiest seabird rehabilitation center in the world.
It was not just 19,000 penguins that suffered from the Treasure spill. Almost a quarter of the bank cormorants at Robben Island died from the oil that poured out of the ship after it ran aground. Conservation workers were able to recover only fifty-three adult cormorants, of any species, after the spill. SANCCOB was able to wash and return seventeen of these back into the wild. When gathering penguins at Robben Island, conservation staff collected over thirty abandoned bank cormorant chicks and brought them in to be hand-reared at SANCCOB. Of these, they were able to return about half to the island. Hundreds more oiled, dying bank cormorants and abandoned chicks remained on other oiled islands; there simply was not enough manpower. Parsons says more cormorants were not gathered because the penguins had a greater chance of survival. But, if we are honest, most of the energies were also devoted to the penguins because they are simply cuter.47
Oil binds to the barbs of the feathers of any bird, disabling its ability to fly and to thermoregulate. Oiled birds starve. They freeze to death. They go blind if the oil gets in their eyes. If they ingest the oil it is toxic to their system.48
The rehabilitation center staff do not see too many oiled cormorants of any species on a regular basis, as they do somewhat consistently the penguins—even when there has been no publicized spill. Parsons thinks they do not get many phone calls about oiled cormorants because of their black plumage. Residents, even wildlife biologists, cannot recognize from afar when the birds are suffering. And also, because cormorants can fly if not completely coated, they are harder to find until they are in really rough shape.
“Often by the time the cormorant is weak enough to be captured,” Parsons says, “it does not stand much chance of surviving in our care.”
Because cormorants of one species or another live along almost every coastline around the earth and certainly along the major shipping routes—which take advantage of ocean currents—these particular seabirds are consistently in harm’s way. The 1989 oil spill from the Exxon Valdez in Alaska killed directly anywhere from 2,900 to 8,800 cormorants of three different species.49 As another example, the Socotra cormorants live exclusively on a dozen or so colonies in the Persian Gulf and the Gulf of Aden. They were dangerously depleted by the Gulf Wars. The now officially “vulnerable” Socotra cormorant is still regularly at risk because of—among other factors—the amount of oil drilling, processing, and ship traffic in the region.50 The Dubai Zoo with local managers has recently been raising and releasing Socotra cormorants in order to bolster the population.51
Because of their migratory nature, however, some cormorant populations have escaped reasonably unharmed immediately after a few of the most massive spills around the world. Relatively few cormorants died from the oil that flooded out of the ship Prestige off the Iberian Peninsula in 2003. Most cormorants seemed to have survived the BP Deepwater Horizon rig explosion in the Gulf of Mexico in 2010. The cormorants were largely elsewhere during these summer events, while together the slicks of petroleum from these two catastrophes killed tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of birds belonging to other species.52
Scientists meanwhile are just beginning to discover how long the damage remains in a given area. Oil spills disturb ecosystems for decades, harming the cormorants and other birds who fish in the area when they return to the region, notably through the diminished health of the water and the web of life living within and around it. Studies in the years after the Prestige spill, for example, show that the European shags sharply reduced their reproduction.53 A recent study at a rookery in Minnesota found in the eggs of returning white pelicans traces of oil and the same chemical dispersant used at the BP spill some eighteen months earlier.54 Thus perhaps the bank cormorants, as well as the gobies, klipfish, and lobster upon which they rely, might still be suffering from the long-term damage of the Treasure and the succession of previous spills.
The staff at SANCCOB see the more direct result of human activities that are lethal to cormorants and other seabirds. These include not only oil spills, but ocean dumping of plastics and other garbage, lost or abandoned fishing gear—both recreational and commercial—and all manner of runoff pollutants, which occur all over the world and reduce fish stocks, prompt algal blooms, and create aquatic dead zones. Cormorants can be especially vulnerable because their range is often close to shore and near urban areas—near cities that may have originally been settled because of easy access to good fishing.
In the region of the Benguela Current, there was an odd case in the 1970s when at least 4,500 cormorants died near the guano platforms off Namibia. It seemed that a dense slick of fish oil had been created when fishermen squeezed an especially large commercial catch of anchovies into their nets and onto the decks of their boats. This oil combined with what spilled into the sea when they offloaded the tons of fish at the dock. Hundreds of the cormorants, rendered flightless by the slick, were run down when they wandered in front of a train or in front of the automobile traffic on the coastal road.55
In all our interviews and correspondence, including several direct requests, I could never get Nola Parsons to tell me about a particular cormorant that she cared for at the rehabilitation center. I wanted to tell you about a single day, about one memorable experience of hers with one bird. But she would never share a story like this with me.
“Working with cormorants in rehab is normally heartbreaking,” she says. “But I have to try to remain objective.”
Parsons works hard to not get emotionally connected to each and every bird—to not pile up the memories and attachments. The job at the rehabilitation center is emotionally exhausting enough as it is. Veteran staff members discourage the vollies from naming the birds unless it is a situation like Bobby and Evil Bobby, animals who will be around in the “home pen” for a while. Some of the named birds they take out to schools and other outreach events in order to teach biology, conservation, and empathy for seabirds.
I think Parsons also submerges most if not all her memories of individual birds because she works with a lot of them after they are dead.
“ I try to do a postmortem evaluation on all birds that die at SANCCOB, ” she says. “But this isn’t always possible because of time, depending on the number and species of birds. I definitely postmortem any bank cormorants that come in, though. I collect basic morphometric measurements. I’ve used bank cormorant samples in my Health Survey project, so we do try to contribute to research even with dead bodies if we can.”
I ask Parsons if her choice to eat as a vegan isn’t entirely for ethical, health, or environmental reasons, but also might be because of her close work with the animals at SANCCOB.
“Well, yes,” she laughs. “I find the thought of eating any bird disgusting after doing so many postmortems, and I especially ask people not to eat duck if I’m eating out at a restaurant with them! South Africa is not the most vegan-friendly country around.”
All that said, Parsons does permit herself an emotional, more significant personal place for bank cormorants as a species, because their population is at such alarmingly low numbers. Another major accident could render the animal functionally extinct in her lifetime.
Fortunately, the plight of this endangered bank cormorant has not been entirely neglectus. Both Namibia and South Africa, spurred on by organizations such as SANCCOB, have tried to place restrictions to protect the birds from human disturbance, but still only a quarter of their rookeries have any sort of nature reserve status, and even here enforcement is difficult on small budgets.56 The cormorants often ride the coattails of the penguins, since the birds usually nest on the same islands. All the Namibian islands were declared a Marine Protected Area in 2009, but illegal fishing remains, and now there seems to be some backroom dealing to allow guano harvesting again on Ichaboe and perhaps other islands. Jessica Kemper of the African Penguins Conservation Project told me recently: “I fear the worst and am somewhat despondent about what might happen next.”57
The cause of trying to keep the bank cormorant from going extinct has been championed by a conservation charity in southwestern England called Living Coasts. They have been working to start a bank cormorant captive breeding program. It is a notable endeavor on a few different levels, not the least being that rallying conservation energy to educate about cormorants can be difficult. It can be hard to excite a member of the public about a similar-looking relative of a bird that a visitor might see near his or her home. Not to mention all the other negative cultural and literary cormorant baggage I’ve been telling you about, especially in England.
Undaunted, the keepers at Living Coasts decided to begin keeping bank cormorants in 2004. Nola Parsons had raised some from chicks rescued by conservation staff at Robben Island. Bank cormorant chicks are often brought in to SANCCOB because heavy seas wash their nests off the breakwater at Robben. Imprinting on humans can be a real problem with raising young birds at the rehabilitation center, but if a lot of chicks remain together, this effect is lessened. In this case Parsons knew they were going to a captive facility, so it was not a concern that these birds liked people and wanted to follow them around. The full transfer up to the uk wasn’t entirely successful, though. Because of concerns about avian influenza, the second group of cormorants were placed in a quarantine facility, where they all died.
Eventually visitors to Living Coasts in Torquay, England, were able to see, photograph, and learn about two bank cormorants, named Mnandi and Amanzi, who waddled around the little beach in Torquay with the African penguins. The cormorants flew around the open-air aviary. Visitors watched the cormorants diving and capturing fish in the underground tanks. Sometimes they could watch bank cormorants nab fish from the hand of a keeper in scuba gear. The director of Living Coasts, Elaine Hayes, told me that to her a bank cormorant’s eye seems “knowing.”58
After learning how to care for the adult bank cormorants, Living Coasts experimented with establishing an in-house breeding program, which they had done successfully with terns, penguins, and other species. In July 2009, Tony Durkin, the head keeper at the time, flew down to South Africa.
“It’s a long way to go for two dozen eggs, but it will be worth it,” Durkin explained in a press release. “It’s an investment in the future of the species.”59
With the help of Nola Parsons and several other individuals and groups, Durkin was able to collect ten eggs at Robben Island.60 He kept them in a portable incubator that South African Airways let him bring aboard and plug in (after a few other airlines turned the concept down because of how bomb-like the incubator appeared).
Once back at the zoo in England, Durkin and the rest of the staff kept careful watch. Nine cormorants hatched, but only one of these survived. As the chick grew and they were able to test for gender—by sending out a tail feather to a lab—it turned out, fortunately, that the fledgling was a female. They named her Mpumi, which is Zulu for “survivor.” The keepers hovered over this cormorant as she grew and learned to fly. Living Coasts managed to get visitors and local bird enthusiasts excited about Mpumi’s significance. Presumably the two male bank cormorants also watched her progress with interest.
Yet one Saturday morning, a little over a year after she hatched, the staff found Mpumi dead. There were no wounds or outward signs of disease. A careful tissue analysis and autopsy also revealed nothing. Elaine Hayes told me that the bird’s death remains a mystery.
Hayes said officially in a press release: “This is truly heartbreaking. The keeping staff—and the rest of the team—are devastated. She is the first bird I have cried over.”61
Mpumi the bank cormorant represented over two and a half years of preparation, research, and hand rearing. Hayes continued: “We have learned a lot from this. We aim to go back next year, collect more eggs and start again. When you are talking about extinction, you can’t admit defeat.”62
Living Coasts did not start right back up again, though. They decided to step back and conduct more research before collecting eggs again. This included another visit by one of the keepers to SANCCOB in order to learn more about their chick-rearing program and to observe the wild colony on Robben Island.
Not everyone is applauding the efforts of Living Coasts. Some ornithologists and conservationists in South Africa are actually pretty skeptical of the program and would much rather any organizational funding be directed toward saving the bank cormorants’ wild habitats, rather than toward what one skeptical scientist based in South Africa calls the “Noah’s Ark solution.”
Elaine Hayes told me recently that she remains committed to making certain that the bank cormorant will not go extinct anytime soon. “All species are worth saving,” she says. “If we have the skills, we should use them.”63
As befits her profession, Nola Parsons says clinically what the poet John Blight implies wickedly: “We need to save the bank cormorant because of its individual place in the ecosystem as well as to help with ensuring that the ocean as a whole remains healthy.”