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Great Cormorant
Phalacrocorax carbo | Aalscholver | Cormorán grande
The Cormorant is the black fisherman that stands with wings spread to dry after every bout of diving, a posture no other European waterbird adopts. Its comeback from the poisoned decades of the twentieth century is spectacular and not uncontested.
Voice
Essentially mute away from the colony. At the nest, from February to June, it gives deep guttural notes and pig-like grunting, a rolling kroa-kroa-kroa amplified by dozens of neighbours. A colony is heard, and smelled, before it is seen.
Recording: Sonothèque ADVL — CC0 · Wikimedia Commons
Identification
Large and black with a bronze-green gloss, a white chin patch and bare yellow skin around the bill base. Breeding birds add a white thigh patch, and the inland form shows extensive white on head and neck. Juveniles are brown with variably white underparts. It swims low, leaps clear when diving, and flies goose-like with a kinked neck, often in lines.
Confusion species
Shag is smaller and slimmer, with a steep forehead, thin bill, bottle-green gloss and no white on the face; in spring it carries a curled crest and it sticks to rocky coasts and open sea. Juvenile Shag is brown with a dark belly. Pygmy Cormorant of south-east Europe is small and long-tailed.
Habitat
Any fish-rich water: large lakes, rivers, harbours, canals and shallow seas. Loafs on groynes, buoys, posts and dead trees, and breeds colonially in trees that die off under years of guano, or on the ground on islands.
Range and movements
Widespread throughout Europe. In the Netherlands numerous year-round, with famous colonies at the Oostvaardersplassen and Naardermeer, dominated by the inland form sinensis. In Spain mainly an abundant winter visitor on reservoirs and rivers, with a growing number of Mediterranean breeding sites.
- Resident
- Breeding (summer)
- Winter
- Passage
- dark = core range, pale = thinly spread
Where and when to look
Early morning at a roost, as birds stream out in lines towards the fishing grounds. In winter scan large reservoirs and lakes for cooperative flocks driving fish like a net; the wing-drying posture also gives the cleanest silhouettes for photography.
Conservation status
Strongly recovered after toxic pesticides were banned and legal protection came in. That success brings conflict with commercial fisheries and fish farms, and with it disturbance and licensed shooting. Locally, water quality and fish stocks decide how colonies fare.