{"id":144927,"date":"2023-10-18T05:41:46","date_gmt":"2023-10-18T11:41:46","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.featheredphotography.com\/blog\/?p=144927"},"modified":"2023-10-18T06:20:11","modified_gmt":"2023-10-18T12:20:11","slug":"double-crested-cormorant-an-irritating-inconvenience-and-then-a-bath","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/2023\/10\/18\/double-crested-cormorant-an-irritating-inconvenience-and-then-a-bath\/","title":{"rendered":"Double-crested Cormorant – An Irritating Inconvenience And Then A Bath"},"content":{"rendered":"

I love documenting bird behaviors, even the mundane ones.<\/p>\n

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Two days ago I spotted this immature Double-crested Cormorant with a moderate-sized fish in ‘his’ bill at Farmington Bay WMA. But I had to back up to the canal he was in to get him on the ‘right’ side of my pickup so by the time I was in position it was too late to see the fish, barely. This is the first shot I got of him and by then the fish was already out of sight, although we can see the bulge in his throat caused by the fish as he was swallowing it.<\/p>\n

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After he swallowed the fish there was still some debris, aquatic vegetation?, hanging from his bill. And he wasn’t happy about it.<\/p>\n

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After that I wasn’t taking many photos of him for a while but in this one, at first, it looked like he’d been able to rid himself of the debris.<\/p>\n

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But a closer look at the same photo reveals that there’s still some of it near the end of his bill. This little bit of debris became quite a problem for him.<\/p>\n

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He dipped his head into the water and then…<\/p>\n

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began thrashing his bill through the water back and forth from side to side in an apparent attempt to get rid of it. All that thrashing created quite a water splash.<\/p>\n

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But apparently the thrashing didn’t solve his problem so…<\/p>\n

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he bent his upper neck 180\u00b0 so he could wipe his bill across the bottom of his lower neck. I don’t believe this was regular preening – he was still trying to rid himself of that nasty stuff stuck in his bill. At this point I was wondering if he was wishing he had hands.<\/p>\n

Apparently this last effort worked because it was then that he…<\/p>\n

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transitioned from trying to clear his bill to taking a bath. During his very long bath (I took 290 photos of him while he was bathing) he…<\/p>\n

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spent nearly all of his time quivering his body feathers, which threw water up and over his back and drenched him completely. It strongly reminded me of a bellowing male crocodile, without the bellowing.<\/p>\n

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He only shook his head and neck…<\/p>\n

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once in that entire time and after he’d successfully rid himself of the debris in his bill he never again dipped his head and neck into the water that I noticed.<\/p>\n

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Typical of many birds, he concluded his bath with a vigorous wing flapping session.<\/p>\n

I don’t know about you, but I often find mundane, everyday bird behaviors like these to be interesting in their own right but if you take lots of photos you never know what unexpected behavior you might document. I read recently in Cornell’s Birds of the World that ornithologists have observed one instance of this species using “a molted secondary feather as a brush-like tool in spreading preen-gland secretion to wings”.<\/p>\n

Now wouldn’t that be something, to document with photos a cormorant as a tool user.<\/p>\n

Ron<\/p>\n

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PS – Sorry, after processing this many photos and composing the text I ran out of time to include image techs.<\/em><\/p>\n

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I love documenting bird behaviors, even the mundane ones. (13 photos)<\/p>\n

Continue reading<\/span><\/i><\/a> <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":144933,"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":[393,5,334,1905,2782,392,395],"tags":[47,7184,1008,7183,7182],"class_list":["post-144927","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-bathing-bird-behaviors","category-bird-oddities","category-birds","category-double-crested-cormorants","category-farmington-bay-waterfowl-management-area","category-feeding-bird-behaviors","category-miscellaneous","tag-bathing","tag-cormorants-as-tool-users","tag-farmington-bay-waterfowl-management-area","tag-fiish","tag-immature-double-crested-cormorant"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/10\/double-crested-cormorant-0470-ron-dudley.jpg","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p1zzJh-BHx","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/144927","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=144927"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/144927\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":144988,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/144927\/revisions\/144988"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/144933"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=144927"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=144927"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=144927"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}