ON THE WING

The cormorant fixed me with a cold state, as icy as the ice-blue of its eyes. The bird had been drying its wings on a slab of rock, off the coast of Bruny Island, and seemed to resent the intrusion, shifting from webbed foot to webbed foot as the boat I was aboard approached.

There was no fear in the cormorant’s eyes, however. More wariness, or curiosity, or even annoyance. Who was this strange creature invading its world, its space out there where Storm Bay merges with the greater Southern Ocean?

Cormorants hardly warrant a second glance from those who love nature, even though they are stunning birds with a bronze scaling to their black plumage.

They are common and ubiquitous around the coasts of Australia, the journeymen and journeywomen of the seas. I see them all the time on the fringes of the docks of Hobart, particularly the black-faced cormorant. All the same, I’ve never studied them closely, beyond trying to count the seconds between them sinking below the surface of the ocean in pursuit of fish, and re-emerging after what seems an impossibly long period.

Now, from a friend’s boat, I see a blackfaced cormorant not as a bobbing halfsubmerged shape on open ocean, rising in a jack-knife leap to plunge for fish. I’m at eye-level, trying to read its thoughts, as I’m sure it’s trying to read mine.

Members of the cormorant family appear to come from a different age, as indeed they do. The Latin name for the family, Phalacrocoracidae, gives a clue to their lineage. Cormorants have ancestors reaching back to the dinosaurs. In fact, the earliest known modern bird, Gansus vumenensis, had basically the same skeletal structure.

The most beautiful of the four species found in Tasmania is the black-faced cormorant, more likely found in a marine setting than the other three, the little, the great black and the little-pied cormorant.

The black-faced cormorant mixes a striking black and white plumage, black on the back, white on the breast, with a black stripe through the face. Cormorants, because they sit low in the water, are more likely to be seen drying their wings out of it, on rocks and jetties. They have to do this because, unlike ducks, they have no oiling mechanism in their feathers.

It was this pose that inspired John Milton in his 1674 poem Paradise Lost to compare them to Satan: “up he flew; and on the Tree of Life … Sat like a cormorant … devising death.”

These days it’s humans devising death for cormorants. In Tasmania the great black and little pied are not protected by law, largely because of the threat they pose to salmon farms. The black-faced cormorant escapes this fate, but still eyes me with wary, cold blue eyes.