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Cormorants catch on for a quick feed

February 21, 2021 Don Knowler

First kelp gulls dropping mussels from dizzy heights to crack them open, now cormorants learning there can be rich pickings when humans go fishing.
Last year I mentioned seeing the street-smart gulls dropping shells on the concrete of the inter-city bike track at Cornelian Bay and now my mail contains evidence of some other smart learned behaviour.
A reader says that when out fishing from a boat off Hog Island in Frederick Henry Bay, she and her family had always noticed that cormorants, unlike the gulls, were notoriously shy and steered well clear if the boat came too close to them.
But one cormorant displayed markedly different behaviour.
“Imagine our surprise to see a cormorant powering towards the boat and pulling up alongside,’’ my correspondent writes.
“Bemused, we wondered what the bird was up to. All was revealed when we started reeling in flathead – the bird had learnt that undersized catches would be released straight back into the water.
“It was ready, and had a number of successful catches of our released small fish. Finally, when we thought we should move off to protect the unfortunate small fish, the cormorant took itself off at a very slow pace, well and truly satisfied with the feed.”
The reader said the family believed the bird was a little black cormorant and they had a similar experience with a not so shy, shy albatross off Maria Island.
Albatrosses are protected species, unlike two of the four species of cormorant we find in Tasmanian waters. It is not surprising that they should be wary of humans, even those on the protected list. These are the black-faced and little black cormorants. Of the other two, the little-pied and the great cormorant, it is the threat they pose to salmon farms that marks them out.
Cormorants’ interaction with fishermen is not new. For thousands of years in Japan and China, fishermen have used trained cormorants to catch fish for them.
To control the birds, the fishermen tie a snare near the base of the bird’s throat. This prevents the cormorants from swallowing larger fish, which are held in their throat. When a cormorant has caught a large fish, the fisherman brings the bird back to the boat and the bird is trained to spit it out. The birds, however, can swallow smaller fish. Although cormorant fishing was once a successful industry, its primary use today is to serve the tourism industry.
In Japan, cormorant fishing still continues in 13 cities. The most famous location is on the Nagara River, in Gifu Prefecture. Here it has continued uninterrupted for the past 1300 years.
Such is the art of cormorant fishing, the practice on the Nagara River has royal status. The “masters’ and their Japanese cormorant charges are employed by the emperor and called Imperial Fishermen of the Royal Household.

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