This week for Flora and Fauna Friday it’s a widespread, weird looking waterbird, the Double-crested Cormorant (Nannopterum auritum).
The Double-crested Cormorant is a bird unlike any of our others. At about the size of a small, svelte goose but with a straight posture and a heavy bill, there’s nothing else that has the same silhouette. The Anhinga is their closest relative in SC but that odd-duck is even less like anything else in our State. Our Cormorant can be found along our coast year round but is most numerous in winter. Adult birds are jet black across the body during the breeding season but their necks and wings take on a more drab ebony hue in the off season. Juvenile birds have a grungy pale-gray belly blending into an equally gungy gray-brown neck. All ages have orange skin at the base of the beak and an aquamarine colored eye. The beak is fairly long and heavy with a sharp hook at the tip of the upper jaw. Their namesake “double-crest” is hard to see except in the breeding plumage of adults who flaunt a pair of thick eyebrows which flare up into cowlicks along the side of the head. Cormorants have stout black legs and webbed feet and can often be spotted standing either straight-backed and statuesque or with wings out-stretched like a sunning vulture atop a pylon, dock, or jetty. Yet, equally as often they can be spotted paddling in a creek, lake, or pond with their neck and a bit of their back exposed on the surface. Cormorants are divers and they propel themselves beneath the water with powerful paddling in pursuit of fish. They have feathers that are partially permeable to water, allowing them to dive more efficiently but still retain some buoyancy and insulation. This is why Cormorants are often seen perched with wings outstretched, as they are drying their feathers. Here on Edisto Island, Double-crested Cormorant can be spotted foraging or perched by themselves but are more often seen in groups ranging from a few to several dozen birds. Elsewhere on colony breeding grounds, they can even be found in the thousands!
