Cormorants: If You Can’t Beat ‘em, Join ‘em

London, England, 1618. The Vine Garden at Westminster Palace. Robert Wood is at work supervising an ambitious and costly project. A small brick building abuts nine brand-new artificial ponds. Those ponds will soon be filled with an impressive aquatic menagerie: 100 carps, barbels, roaches and whitefish. A sluice system supplies the new tenants with fresh(ish) water from the nearby Thames.

Overwrought ornamentation? Nope. The whole elaborate setup is in service of King James I, and a  strange royal distraction that’s been sweeping Europe.

The Japanese call it Ukai. The Chinese call it fàng yīng. And when you learn what it is, and its humble origins, the whole endeavour seems all the more ridiculous.

Ukai / fàng yīng has existed since at least the Tang Dynasty (618-907 CE) in Asia. Its origin is a bit of a mystery. It appears almost simultaneously in records from Japan and China, with no clear progenitor. At the time, cultural cross-pollination between the two countries was rampant. Regardless of who came up with the idea originally, at some point they got it in their heads that cormorants could be used to fish with.

We’ve maligned cormorants throughout history for a lot of questionable reasons. And one of the most enduring is that they are exceptional predators. They can clear out a school of fish while we’re still threading our fishing lines. Flocks of cormorants have actually been observed working together to herd fish for easier hunting. 

Cormorants are more at home in the water than the air. Their wings are so purpose-driven as rudders that it greatly affects their ability to fly: they expend more energy doing so than any other bird. Their feet, feathers and tails have all evolved for underwater maneuverability and locomotion. Even among diving birds they’re pretty exceptional. 

At best we tend to shake our fists at the cormorant when it’s us vs them. At worst we try to wipe them out so we don’t have to compete with them. But the first practitioners of Ukai took a different approach: if you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em.

Cormorant fishing is traditionally done from individual wooden fishing boats. The fisherman brings along a few cormorants to their desired spot, then sets them loose to go to work. But there are two critical accoutrements on the birds that keep them in line. First, a line - or lead, or leash. Second, they wear a tight (but not too tight) metal snare around the base of their necks. It lets smaller fish pass. But any catch worth the fisherman’s time gets stuck. And the cormorant has been trained to bring those fish back to the boat where they regurgitate them into a basket (Hakekago, in Japan) and are rewarded, if you can call it that, with another smaller fish. 

In this way, the prowess of the cormorant is the success, rather than vexation, of the fisherman. Ignore the indignity of the whole thing for the bird and it can seem borderline symbiotic. 

And importantly, it’s originally a subsistence practice. A few cormorants could modestly ensure food for the fisherman and their family. The Tang Dynasty poet Du Fu sums it up tidily in a couplet ~710 CE:

Every household keeps cormorants,
There is fish with every meal.

And so it was, until the mid-1500s (or so. Tracing the path of such a niche activity is never a precise science). The first reliable source of cormorant fishing in Europe comes from Venice in 1557. But by the next century it had been taken up in elsewhere, albeit in a bastardized form.

There’s the possibility of cultural co-evolution here, but more likely it was early European explorers who brought the idea back from Asia with them. A generation after Marco Polo, Odoric of Pordenone traveled to China in the early 1300s as a missionary and recorded everything he saw. He was the first European that we know of to document the practice of cormorant fishing - though there’s even uncertainty there. Some believe he was simply taken to watch cormorants hunt for themselves in vibrant rivers overstuffed with fish. But others say he saw bona fide fàng yīng, and helped introduce the practice to Europe, where it flourished mostly in England and France*.

So, once it had been imported, how did Europeans go about cormorant fishing? Definitely not for subsistence. The evidence is all back where we started in 1618, at Westminster. The humble practice is now being directed through purpose-built artificial ponds supplied with stocked fish, all under the auspices of the English king’s ‘Master of Cormorants’ Robert Wood** (who inherited the post from his father). In the hands of European royalty, cormorant fishing became an amusing aristocratic hobby, a show to put on for visiting dignitaries. Falconry was already a royal fetish. Its only flaw was that the hawks molted in  the summer and couldn’t be flown.  But cormorants fish year-round. No more dull season bereft of avian amusement.

Falconry also provided cormorant fishing with a European twist. Rather than hunting from a boat, the birds would be manned like a hawk, launching and returning to the fist. And rather than regurgitating their catch, a ‘tender’ would ‘make in’ the poor bird, manually running a closed hand up the neck and forcing the fish out.

Like any good fad, cormorant fishing in Europe rose and fell with the times (the English civil war seems to have put a damper on the whole thing, locally at least). After its 1600s heyday, it had a resurgence in the 1800s. This time practitioners went so far as to don full Chinese mandarin outfits, really driving home both the cultural appropriation and its status as more pantomime than utilitarian.

More interesting is what was, and is, happening to cormorant fishing in its birthplace. For a long time, it was just a way to put fish on the table. There was even a time when an industrious fisherman in Asia could turn a profit from it. But those days were dwindling. Modern, large-scale fishing practices had at long last beaten the cormorant at their own game. But that didn’t just make cormorant fishing the less efficient option. Those same industrial practices were wreaking havoc on fish populations throughout Asia.

When Odoric of Pordenone had been taken to watch cormorants hunt in the 1300s, the rivers had been churning with fish. Now? The churn had become a weak flop. Overfishing and pollution worked through the waterways. The ease with which a cormorant fisherman could fill a Hakekago became a thing of the past. Forget profits - it was starting to look like even subsistence was off the literal and metaphorical table.

Until, in a strange twist of fate, this ancient practice - borrowed by the Europeans - was resuscitated by borrowing back: don’t do it to survive, do it as a show.

700-plus years after Odoric, a modern surge of explorers were flooding Asia. They were recording everything they saw too - on smartphones, for social media. Their currency was unique experiences, strange exotic customs, a flash of novelty to catch the fleeting attention of their followers. Like seeing a man in a wooden boat light a lantern and head out into the twilit waters of a gorgeous inlet to make a bird catch fish for him.

So Ukai, fàng yīng, isn’t exactly thriving, but it is surviving. By taking a little page out of the European playbook, which originally took a large page out of their playbook, the 1300-year-old art endures in instagram feeds and TikTok videos. Tourists want ‘authentic’ and ‘traditional’ experiences. And now one of those authentic and traditional experiences only exists thanks to them. Like the fisherman and his cormorant, a new symbiosis has emerged.

*It was also practiced in Greece and North Macedonia. 

**Robert Wood actually got into some trouble when it came to this title. He promised his appointment to a man named Richard Makin in exchange for forgiveness of debts plus some cash. But Makin says that Wood then sold his ‘Master of Cormorants’ title again to one William Melyn. Serendipitously for Robert Wood and no one else in England, the political tensions leading to the civil war were just starting to boil over and it seems the matter was dropped.