NATURE COLUMN: Bill Cawley

I WAS in Liverpool recently and walked by the pier head. On top of the Liver Building, the two Liver birds gazed over the city with wings wide and beaks open.

(Incidentally I noticed a Leek connection as the memorial to the stokers of the Titanic by the pier was designed by Norman Shaw the architect of All Saints in Leek).

The Liver birds are supposed to be a combination of a cormorant and an eagle.

I will concentrate on the cormorant rather than the mythic creation above the Mersey.

I saw cormorants a little closer to home during the winter at Tittesworth standing on a boom and with wings open looking for an opportunity to feed.

The bird’s skill at fishing has garnered feelings of resentment from anglers who see the possibility of catches reduced by the company of the big black bird.

Some years the presence of cormorants at Pennington Flash near Wigan where I then lived caused some tension between anglers and conservationists with an angry exchange of letters in The Observer.

It has not always been the case and the unquestionable ability of the bird was initially seized on in Ancient Japan, where cormorants were trained as far back as the thicentury to fish, their gullets tied up to stop them swallowing their catch. It is known as ukai.

Sometime in the 17th century this use of the bird was brought to Europe by Jesuit missionaries from Asia.

The first account of tamed cormorants in England appears in 1608 when James I visited Thetford in Norfolk and was welcomed by three cormorants on a steeple.

The birds were taken to a nearby river where they dived in catching eels which were regurgitated at the feet of the king.

John Wood became master of the royal cormorants the following year.

Wood was annually paid £85 a year to journey to the Isle of Man in search of nesting cormorants.

Local fowlers were lowered down cliff faces on ropes made from salted cow hides and an ample number of birds procured.

The ropes were a prize possession of Manx families and were passed down from generation to generation as a wedding gift.

After the Restoration Ralph Leek became the Master of the Royal Cormorants.

The payment for obtaining the birds from the north remained at £85.

The post was abolished by 1667 as the royal court sought savings to address the massive rebuilding of the capital after the Great Fire the year before and never reinstated.

The Master of the Royal Cormorants was the victim of cuts.

However back in Japan the imperial cormorant trainers still exists and at select times of year members of the imperial household come down and see the birds perform on the River Nagara.