Spring is in the air and on the water. These past few weeks, I’ve been watching a colony of double-crested cormorants, back after wintering south of here, remake their nests on the Provincetown breakwater. The males soar in with streamers of grass, seaweed, rope, and anything else they think will impress a mate who, after witnessing the big display of his offering, takes it and weaves it into her nest.
These birds might feel like visual background noise, but we’re very lucky to live in a place where we can easily see the scene of a colony unfolding. Just by going out to the end of MacMillan Pier, we can watch an amazing spectacle: from nest-building to egg-laying to chick-rearing (and feeding) to fledging. And to see a cormorant in the water as it arcs up to dive for fish is the epitome of witnessing grace.
Sometimes, if you stand on the upper pier and look down along the Cee-Jay or the Dolphin Fleet boats, you can see cormorants swimming along with powerful strokes of their webbed feet — which, as in all members of the order Pelecaniformes, have four webs, rather than the three of ducks and gulls. Silver air bubbles stream from their feathers as their long necks snake left and right while they hunt for fish.
If you’re able to get out in a boat and drift a respectful distance from the rocks — but not so close as to make the birds restless — more details are revealed. You will be able to see the tufts that spring from their heads like wild eyebrows. The bright orange of their gular pouches will impress you, as will the emerald glint of their eyes and the bright blue when they open their bills. And the sounds these birds make are marvelous beyond belief. They gutter and gravel and croak and then, sometimes, let loose a gentle goose-like honk.
Yes, I know I’m waxing enthusiastic. But cormorants deserve it, particularly because these birds get a bum rap. While cormorants and people have worked together to catch fish in Southeast Asia, Peru, and India, they are less beloved in North America. If you want to learn more, I recommend The Devil’s Cormorant: A Natural History by Richard J. King. Even better, read Truro poet Brendan Galvin’s wonderful poem, which I’m happy to offer here.
Sometimes, poetry gets its energy from the delight of colloquial language — like trash talk or swearing. The best way to show love can be to give someone a funny nickname. And our most intimate knowledge of animals often comes not from scientific notes but from daily observations and the descriptions that seep into our conversations, familiar and casual in the way we see and know our neighbors.
“A Few Local Names of the Double-Crested Cormorant” playfully celebrates the more hilarious aspects of a cormorant’s infamy with fond humor. Within Galvin’s acknowledgement of how humans are plagued by the “goo loon’s” intensely aromatic and hard-to-scrub guano (to which I can personally attest), there is also admiration for this ancient bird’s persistence and skill. If you need a reminder of the power of stubbornness and the beauty of unpretty thriving, look to the cormorant and take heart. As Mary Oliver says of skunk cabbage, “What blazes the trail is not necessarily pretty.”
Welcome back, shag rats! I’ll be watching.
A Few Local Names of the Double-Crested Cormorant
By Brendan Galvin
This is the fishbird that flew here
directly out of its fossil imprint, unchanged
for sixty million years, hell’s turkey
from its punk hairdo to its black rubber
scuba-flipper feet, hanging its wingspread
to dry on rocks and creek banks, crosstrees
of masts, the insignia of a country that has
no plans for peace and no word for civility,
nesting in branches of matted seaweed
this guano goose fixes in a mixture
of its own trashfish paste and pellets,
until the tree surrenders of chagrin
and collapses to poison its pond. It is all
overstatement, stink duck and goo loon,
and can make a buffet of a fish farmer’s
ponds, then slime every deck in the harbor
with the by-product overnight, collateral
damage, its green mineral eyechip
and yellow gawp testimony that it knows
it has thrived beyond dinosaurs
and will slip past even the cockroaches
on its own slicks, this gluebird,
stool pigeon, shag rat.
From Habitat: New and Selected Poems 1965-2005. Reprinted with permission from Louisiana State University Press.
