A thin black line wavers across the sky. Perhaps they are a flock of undisciplined geese, but even from this distance they appear to be something else. They seem smaller than geese, more slender, their wing-beats quicker. As they gradually descend from their high flight, several of the birds in the line pause their flapping for several seconds. They soar, then resume beating their wings. These brief glides, in small groups, continue smoothly along the flock so that the string of birds seems from afar to pulse within its fluid formation.
The birds now fly close overhead. They begin to pull up vertically and alight on the island with their wide, webbed feet. Aside from the soft shush-shush of their wings, these animals have been completely silent: not a single honk or caw or whistle announces their arrival.
They land on a clump of rocks called Gates Island, just by the mouth of the Mystic River at the far eastern edge of Long Island Sound. Few people notice. From the town on the opposite side of the river, on a clear day, Gates Island is barely a gray-blue bulge on the horizon. That town is a summer tourist village that once built ships and still clings to a small commercial fishing fleet. This morning the mouth of the river is empty save for a couple of bald boats that were never hauled out for the winter, a few navigational buoys, and the hundreds of floats that mark the places of summer yacht moorings. It is quiet enough to hear the breeze over the river’s surface, the plunk of oars into the water, and the occasional chime of a halyard clinking against a metal mast.
It is a cold morning when the first cormorants arrive, only a couple hours after dawn. The water directly beneath the sun is sparkly and bangled. Gates Island has neither trees nor any real foliage, only the spongy brown dirt and sand that have settled between piles of granite rocks and boulders. The cormorants find that heavy winter weather has blown away nearly all of the nests built last year.
In their current form, cormorants have migrated along the eastern coast of North America for millions of years. The earliest progenitors of this species lived perhaps sixty million years ago. Evolution has crafted an animal that can migrate the length of a continent, dive and hunt in the pitch dark beneath the water’s surface, perch comfortably on a branch or wire, walk on land, climb up cliff faces, feed on thousands of different prey species, and live beside both fresh and salt water in a vast global range of temperatures and altitudes, often in close vicinity to man.
Six species of cormorants live in North America. In all there are about forty species of these birds, often known as shags, and they roost beside nearly every major body of fresh and salt water except the central Pacific Ocean. Cormorants live in Siberia and Tierra del Fuego, in Israel and India and Indianapolis, beside the Amazon, the Nile, and the Yangtze. Cormorants soar in the high altitudes of Nepal and Peru and dive to bone-chilling depths in both the Arctic and Antarctic seas.
This March morning the cormorants return to Gates Island and have a look around. They are hungry for fish. They shit sometimes.
This ability to catch fish and the nature of their guano have brought cormorants an extraordinary amount of human attention.