A Festival of Cormorants on Como Lake

A glorious day on Como Lake. We're always astounded to see ONE cormorant there, as lakesides are not this species' preferred location. They're shore birds whose massive wingspan you can see from a mile away. The lake is stocked, so I think this small flock came for an easy meal. They like to hold their wings up, either to sun them, dry them or just give them a stretch.

This day there were FIVE of them roosting on a single log. One seemed to have a bit of fishing line on it, but I hoped it wasn't doing any damage. Birds are such mysterious creatures! Every time we go anywhere to birdwatch, it's a different experience.

I saw a large brown duck with NINE ducklings at the end of the summer - the wrong time to hatch out your young, but there they were. This duck was, I believe, a khaki Cam pbell, a large domestic bird raised for meat. It must have escaped the barnyard and mated with a wild mallard, as the babies were an interesting hybrid of fluffy yellow and mallard-ish mottled brown. Then, all at once, they disappeared, and I have never seen them again.

But who knows. . . one day, months from now, we may see half-grown, multicolored ducklings in the lake. Or not. Were they some wild predator's easy meal? Even crows have been known to swoop down on ducklings and carry them off. But we've seen domestic birds - many times - in semi-wild settings like this.

We saw five white domestic ducks at Burnaby Lake, along with several gorgeous doves, but like the others, the numbers dwindled and they eventually disappeared. We also followed two large domestic ducks, likely a mated pair, for several years, before they also vanished, likely eaten by predators. All part of nature, where bird eats bird, but hair-raising nonetheless.

A cormorant on Blakeburn Lagoon!

Cormorants diving in LaFarge Lake

Increasingly, I find my peace, if I find any, walking around lakes. Now that I am aware of birds, it's amazing what that bird's-eye view can reveal. For example: there may have been cormorants in LaFarge Lake before, but we never saw them. Cormorants aren't fresh-water birds for the most part; they hang around the coast, probably because the fishing there is easy. But LaFarge is stocked with fish for sport, and right now those fish would probably be right-sized for the cormorant's diving.

Another thing they do - and this almost freaks people out, it looks so strange - is perch on a rock and stretch out their enormous wings and wave them gently, as if drying them. I hope to get a better video than the one below, taken at a great distance, but that one at least gives you an idea.

Their wings look batlike and a little frightening. There is something of the pelican about the cormorant, something of the heron and something of the seagull, and yet what they remind me of the most is the dodo bird.

Photographing these marvels is tricky, because without any warning at all they disappear into a straight-down dive, coming up somewhere quite else. They stay down an amazingly long time. Lately we've been treated to various different deep-lake divers, most notably the hooded merganser (and were THEY there all along, for years and years, and we never saw them?). In full hoodedness, the male's heads look like small china dinner plates, very white and flat.

I know this is only the beginning of my birded-ness, and I find myself literally running after them with my camera like some demented old-lady birder crashing through the underbrush. Even the back yard is exciting. It's different every day, and we've had some spectacular moments - a couple of months ago I was swarmed with blackbirds wanting to eat out of my hand, and a year or so ago when everything was iced over, all the birds congregated on the open water on Burnaby Lake. I've never seen so many different kinds of birds in one place, at one time.