{"id":113007,"date":"2022-06-24T05:30:28","date_gmt":"2022-06-24T11:30:28","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.featheredphotography.com\/blog\/?p=113007"},"modified":"2022-06-24T05:44:41","modified_gmt":"2022-06-24T11:44:41","slug":"cormorant-food-fight-the-disturbance","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/2022\/06\/24\/cormorant-food-fight-the-disturbance\/","title":{"rendered":"Cormorant Food Fight – “The Disturbance”"},"content":{"rendered":"

The rest of the story.<\/p>\n

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Yesterday I posted this photo of a Double-crested Cormorant intensely watching a “disturbance” that had just broken out on the water maybe 50′ in front of ‘him’ and to my left. Immediately after I took the photo the cormorant rushed over to join the brouhaha at the same time I was swinging my lens to my left to photograph it. At that time I said that I’d post photos of the disturbance “soon”. Today is the day.<\/p>\n

The thirteen photos below are presented in the order they were taken but I took too way too many to include all of them here so there are ‘skips”.<\/p>\n

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The disturbance was a food fight, initially involving three other cormorants duking it out over a rainbow trout. Here one of the three cormorants is hard to see but…<\/p>\n

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he’s there, almost climbing up over the back of the bird with the fish.<\/p>\n

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At first they all had their backs to me but the light angle was good for a decent exposure on nearly black birds so…<\/p>\n

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we can still follow the action of the individual cormorants reasonably well.<\/p>\n

As for me, well I was just firing away with no idea what I was photographing, other than it was a serious and very loud fight with all of their wings flapping against the water and each other. I didn’t even know how many birds were involved or if they were all cormorants. Or not.<\/p>\n

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At times all I could distinguish was a jumble of black feathers and flying water with the trout being the most identifiable individual in the bunch.<\/p>\n

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At that point, Johnny-Come-Lately finally showed up – the cormorant I’d been photographing when the fight started.<\/p>\n

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So now there were four of them but one or more were often underwater because cormorants can actually swim underwater as fast or faster than they can run\/fly across the water’s surface. Their strategy seemed to be to swim underwater to the front of the bird with the fish and then try to reach up out of the water and snatch the fish out of that bird’s beak.<\/p>\n

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At times the cormorants were hard to see through all of the flying water. They were really creating a ruckus.<\/p>\n

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Here it looks like there’s only one bird but…<\/p>\n

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the other three were using their submarine strategy to get closer to the fleeing cormorant with the fish and…<\/p>\n

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pop up in a more…<\/p>\n

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advantageous position. But by now it was too late – the fish had already been swallowed. Or nearly so.<\/p>\n

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So the fight was over. The cormorant who ate the fish, in the middle on the left, almost seemed to gloat over his victory.<\/p>\n

Cormorants often forage for food in groups and I’m convinced that part of that strategy involves opportunistic kleptoparasitism. I’ve seen these food fights a few times in the past but this series is my best documentation of the behavior. So far.<\/p>\n

Ron<\/p>\n

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Note: Image techs for this series are in the range of 1\/1600 – 1\/2500, f\/5.6, ISO 800, Canon R5, Canon EF500mm f\/4L IS II USM + 1.4 tc<\/em><\/p>\n

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The rest of the story. (14 photos)<\/p>\n

Continue reading<\/span><\/i><\/a> <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":113009,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[334,1905,392,394],"tags":[1901,141,6398,1430,6210,6399,311],"class_list":["post-113007","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-birds","category-double-crested-cormorants","category-feeding-bird-behaviors","category-fighting-bird-behaviors","tag-double-crested-cormorant","tag-fish","tag-food-fight","tag-kleptoparasitism","tag-nannopterum-auritum","tag-rainbow-trout","tag-utah-2"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/06\/double-crested-cormorant-0689-ron-dudley.jpg","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p1zzJh-toH","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/113007","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=113007"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/113007\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":113058,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/113007\/revisions\/113058"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/113009"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=113007"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=113007"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=113007"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}