Thick fog. Low tide. Cormorants fly on and off the island so low that their wings almost touch the glassy surface of the water. The high-pitched peeping of hundreds of chicks is steady and more noticeable because the gulls are quiet, as if dampened by the fog. A long shrill comes from an oystercatcher that has finished its meal on the limpets exposed at the southern rocks, where the juvenile cormorants roost. The smell of the exposed seaweed mixes with that of guano and warm fish.
On Gates Island dozens of the nests are now empty, especially those around the two boulders. Black woolly cormorant chicks waddle around or stand on some of the rocks. The four oldest chicks from the first clutch are by the two boulders. (The fifth and last of this clutch hatched but starved within a few days.) The four chicks are now almost the height of the adults but are more slender. They are still covered with fleece-like down, except that their wings and tail have begun to grow true feathers. Their feet are caked with white guano. They can swim if pressed but cannot fly. Younger, downier cormorant chicks stumble around in little gangs. From the fog each has glistening webs of white water droplets lacing its fleece.
At the moment, over one hundred adults are standing beside nests with small chicks or sitting on their nests with newborns and the last laid eggs of the season. Under one male cormorant are the freshest eggs, a clutch of three that are the product of a pair trying again after the first were crushed and eaten by a gull.
Through the fog both the male and the female of that first pair of cormorants by the boulders have flown off. The male forages by a harbor breakwater some distance away. He flies back directly to the colony, navigating somehow in the fog. When he lands, his chicks immediately leave their group and run, half fly, over to him, shrilling and jabbing at his beak and gular pouch. He resists.
Eventually the father allows the most persistent chick to probe its head entirely into his mouth and down into his neck. The chick’s beak is visible poking within the father’s throat. He pushes the chick’s head down and regurgitates a few warm whole cusks into the chick’s mouth. The chick pulls out and swallows visibly.
The other three chicks begin to pursue their father once again. But he flies back out into the fog.
Soon a motorboat anchors beside the northern rocks of the island. One gull swoops toward the head of the driver, who turns away. The man has brought what looks to be his two children with him. Wearing high boots, he eases into the water and then picks the children up and carries them close enough to the island where their own boots will be high enough to walk the rest of the way through the water. Startled by the aggressiveness of the gulls, one of the kids slips on algae. She stays quiet as instructed and doesn’t get too wet.
As soon as the people set foot on the rocks of the island, all the adult cormorants fly off. The cormorant chicks that can swim tumble into the water. The younger chicks frantically scurry closer together and hide behind the boulders or rock crevices. They peep more loudly and more urgently.
The man and the two children walk around the outside of the island. At first both the girls hold their nose and laugh, but they begin to smile less as they look around. Dead chicks, moldy eggshells, and even the parts of a dead adult gull are scattered around the colony. Dead chicks have been pressed into the formation of nests. Small phlegmy pellets and half-digested pockets of dead fish, finger-length eels, and red shrimps are on the ground, dried and covered with guano before a gull or a crow from the shore had a chance to eat them. One child points to a leathery carcass of a large cormorant chick between rocks. Its spine is mostly exposed, its muscles still red under the peeled black skin. The man redirects their attention and shows them a nest in which cormorant chicks squeal and stab up at them with open beaks. The girls lean over at another cormorant nest in which there is a newborn. The man says it’s ugly. He points over to a downy speckled gull chick, which he says is much cuter.
Hundreds of cormorant adults and chicks swim quietly just off the island, but closer than they would have a month ago, since they are worried about their offspring. When the man leads the children toward the gull chick, the gull parent rushes down at them out of the air with its beak and wings. The two children scream.
The man leads the girls off the island, crouching, back into the water. He carries the two at the same time over and into the boat. While he climbs back in himself, while he starts up the motor and flips on the radar, while he pulls up the anchor, and while the two children giggle about their adventure as the boat roars away back into the fog, a half dozen of the gulls land back on the island. They stand over the uncovered cormorant nests. Each gull pauses, looks around. One reaches down with its stout yellow beak and lifts up a bald cormorant newborn. He swallows it alive and whole. The other gulls tilt their heads back to help them get cormorant nestlings down. The mother of a gull chick hops over to a nest and nabs a cormorant newborn, too. She brings it over to teach her offspring how to tear it apart.