Cormorant Graveyard
tommy thompson park - APRIL 10, 2022
Birds are definitely getting impatient for spring. The temperature was just above freezing, and felt worse with the sharp wind off the lake, but even in the week’s time since my last visit it felt like a lot more activity was stirring in the trees.
The cliff swallows aren’t back yet, but the tree swallows are already crowding and squabbling over brand new nest boxes. Sparrows and red-winged blackbirds are vying for loudest voice on branches. Robins are bouncing around everywhere. The outsized noise of tiny woodpeckers is ringing out among the trees. Double-crested cormorants, still not in their breeding season numbers, are nonetheless becoming a more common sight overhead, moving from their hunting grounds out on the open lake to their nesting site on the north shore of the park. In a couple of months those bare trees are going to be crowded with them. For now, it’s just a few solitary cormorants settling in or addressing winter damage, flying in with sticks in their beaks.
I veered down a path I hadn’t been down before when a ‘sensitive wildlife area’ sign stopped me, but ended up in what looked like a carefully managed copse of trees, and turned out to be a graveyard. Fallen cormorant nests littered the ground and here and there were remains of birds themselves, desiccated by winter. I’m not sure if this was the natural life cycle I was seeing, something carefully managed, or something darker: the results of the recent ‘open season’ on cormorants last fall.
In any event, I’m working on a video about the double-crested cormorant’s reputation and the response to their nesting sites here, so the macabre scene was, at least, very helpful! I took a long sit at the lakeshore there to spend some time with a pair of mute swans as they slowly put together a nest and chased away some geese - a nice yin to the cormorant graveyard yang.