Shags: here there & everywhere

Symmetrical cormorants and fake owl for crop

A pair of great cormorants not at all threatened by a plastic owl

I think I’m slowly overcoming my prejudice against ducks.  My duckism, if you like.  There’s a sudden movement on the waterline, I fumble for my camera, then I realise it’s “just a duck”.

But slowly I’ve been persuaded that ducks are worth the effort.  There’s the crazy goitre of the musk duck.   The hardhead, gruesomely named after the challenges taxidermists faced stuffing its cranium.  The nest-thieving pinkeared eared duck, with its black and white stripes and hints of neon.  The good-looking but possibly feckless chestnut teal, said to engage in “dump laying” – dropping eggs in other teals’ nests to be raised. Even shooters participating in the autumnal “kill a duck in a national park” festival aren’t allowed to blow away the increasingly rare blue winged Australasian shoveler. (Field and Game Australia chair was said to be “disappointed” about this).

In the same way, I’m slowly starting to come around to the shag .  It’s not that I’ve got a particular prejudice against them.  It’s just that they’re always there.  Whatever the time of day, season or weather conditions.  Familiarity breeds not so much contempt as slight indifference.

But these foggy winter mornings have shown cormorants in a new (filtered) light.

Cormorant raft monochrome flying bird crop square

Post-apocalyptic stillness and deep chill don’t deter them.  When there’s nothing moving – maybe just a single sea-eagle enveloped in the mist – the cormorants are the silhouettes that make that gloomy snap worthwhile.

Four of the five species of Australasian cormorants can be found on my bit of the Hawkesbury.  Only the black-faced cormorant, which only lives on the south coasts – in Tassie, Victoria, South Australia and Western Australia – has never made an appearance around here.

My favourite is the biggest, the great cormorant, Phalacrocarax carbo (or the black shag in New Zealand).  It’s the world’s most widespread cormorant, found across Europe, India, Africa and South East Asia.

The little black cormorant is lovely too, with its jade green eyes and black-on-black pattern.  I’ll never forget the feathered hush of a huge flock of them passing overhead as I paddled in  in Myall Lakes National Park a few years back.  Like other cormorants, they usually nest colonially, with lots of other waterbirds.  These little black cormorants sometimes combine in flocks of hundreds to feed cooperatively as well, a line of birds trapping fish in inlets as the tide retreats.  But I’ve never seen them flying or feeding en masse on the Hawkesbury or its tributaries.

The pied cormorant is a regular sight around here too.  I haven’t seen them nesting though, even in the mangroves of Big Bay or Spectacle Island, though flooded forests – along with coastal islands – are apparently the sites they pick to raise their young.  In the past, the pied, along with the great cormorant, were suspected by fishermen of raiding nets and at times licences were distributed to cull them.  But mostly, along with crustaceans and molluscs, they eat the small fry, too insignificant to interest human fisherfolk.

I’m not so keen on the little pied cormorants – no glamorous green eye!  I see fewer of them, though apparently they do congregate in large flocks in coastal areas.  Along with the little blacks, they’re also found right across Australia’s inland waterways and dams, feeding on crustaceans, especially freshwater yabbies, as well as little fish.

Little cormorant drying wings good wave pattern crop

Little pied cormorant drying its wings at Donnybrook Bay

I say cormorants are everywhere – from the turbid shallows at the top of Berowra Creek to the open water where the Hawkesbury meets the sea.  But that’s not strictly true.  Cormorants prefer fishing over seagrass – there’s a better range of things to eat there. And seagrass beds are under threat all over the place.  A study tracking of numbers of coastal birds at a tidal bay in Victoria for over 40 years found that not only migratory birds but the year-round residents, including cormorants, had reduced in numbers:

The marked decline in some (predominantly) fish-eating birds (Australian pelican, great cormorant, little pied cormorant, white-face heron and grey-tailed tattler) around the early 1980s closely matches the beginning of a decline in commercial fish catch… Decreases in fish-eating birds and fish coincide with substantial losses of seagrass in the bay (Hansen et al 2015 524)

Cormorant about to be eaten bigger square

Cormorant avoiding a shark at Dusty Hole in Berowra Creek

And it seems, cormorants tend to steer clear of shallow water, no matter how good the spread, if there’s sharks about.  Just another reason for a kayaker to love a shag!

Egg blue sky and fog on beach at Twin Beaches

Egg the ancient kayak at Twin Beaches

Additional references:

Dorfman, E.J. and Kingsman, M.J. “Environmental determinants of distribution and foraging behaviour of cormorants (Phalacrocorax spp.) in temperate estuarine habitats” Marine Biology 2001 138 1-10

Hansen, B., Menkhorst, P., Moloney, P and Loyn, R. “Long-term declines in multiple waterbird species in a tidal embayment, south-east Australia” Austral Ecology (2015) 40, 515–527

Heithaus, M.R. “Habitat use and group size of pied cormorants (Phalacrocorax varius) in a seagrass ecosystem: possible effects of food abundance and predation risk” Marine Biology (2005) 147: 27–35

Traylerd, K.M., Brothers, D.J., Woollera, R.D., and Potter, I.C. 1989 “Opportunistic foraging by three species of cormorants in an Australian estuary” Journal of Zoology (1989) 218, 87-98

Cormorants in mist

Rest day on the Tour de Hawkesbury

Plunging down the switchbacks of Berowra Waters Road with a canoe strapped on top as a weekend dawn breaks is a hair raising experience, for a newbie driver like me anyway.  At any moment, heavy breathing MAMILs (Middle Aged Males In Lycra according to our friend Bruce Ashley, author of Bike It! Sydney and Cycling around Canberra) might suddenly loom out of the fog in the middle of the not-quite-two-lane road.

They’ve swooped down through Galston Gorge, across the only bridge, passed swiftly through Arcadian horsey country, and after a moment of quietly gazing out at the marina as they cross the ferry, they’re battling the steep 200 metres ascent up to the ridge.  It would seem rather cruel if, after all that effort, my kayak shot off the roof in an emergency stop and impaled them before they got that well-earned coffee.

Scary as this drive is, it’s not quite as nerveracking as coming back from the Hawkesbury up the Old Pacific Highway on a misty morning – a journey that is begging to be made into a terrifying but addictive computer game called something like “Drive of Doom” or “Death Dodgems”.

Peering through the billowing mist round the hairpin bends, you hope you’ll spot the scattered packs of labouring MAMILs in time to slide right, all the while praying that a mob of motorbikes doesn’t choose that moment to come roaring up from behind to wipe themselves out on your rear window.  Or that an oncoming vehicle doesn’t take the next tight corner wide and smash into you headlong.  The reward if you win a game is obvious: a triumphant stop high above the clouds at “Pie in the Sky“, a place where the lambs lie down with the lions, or at least, the road cyclists eat pies with the bikies.

But not this weekend.  Not a single specimen of the MAMIL, keystone species in our local ecosystem, to be seen.  What’s going on around here?

Eventually, as I hauled the kayak off the car and wrestled it into the water, I worked it out.  The MAMILs have been up all night watching the Tour de France.  At two o’clock in the morning they were gripped as Mark “The Manx Missile” Cavendish floated past Andre “The Gorilla” Greipel to claim his first stage win in two years, his twenty sixth stage in the Tour.  And they’re still curled up in bed, knees bent under the covers, dreaming they’re Australia’s next Cadell Evans.  Middle aged, but still contenders.

The river was very very quiet too.  In February this year, I ventured for the first time into the brackish winding creeks that feed Calabash Bay.  It was fish paradise.  Despite my complete indifference to fish as a meal, pet or leisure pursuit, the sheer numbers of tiny transparent spratlings leaping from the water and darting between the mangrove roots was eye opening.

Even nearly twenty years ago, just after the high point of algae blooms and floating maritime corpses in Berowra Creek, research into estuary processes discovered twenty nine species of fish up and down the water.  Marra Marra Creek, in the lower reaches, with its saltmarshes and long stretch of mangroves, was the richest, but even upstream there were flathead and flounder, gobies and mullet and perchlets, silver biddies and pacific blue eye.

But this weekend, nothing.  I went to see the fish and it was out.

One azure kingfisher was so weak with hunger it sat exhausted on a waterside twig in full view long enough for me to take a numerous terrible blurry photographs.  If I keep going out in these lean times, I may finally get the chance to take a sharp, closeup shot of an emaciated glinting blue bird spiralling slowly downriver on its back.

Despite my glass-half-empty-and-probably-tainted-with-nuclear-fallout tendencies, I’m pretty sure the lack of visible fish is a natural thing, part of the cycle of life.  Most of the inhabitants of the creek spawn in spring and summer, so the tiddlers of the summertime shallows are no doubt happily traversing deeper waters now, invisible and unknowable to those who drift involuntarily into unconsciousness at the mere mention of rod, bait or tackle.

There must have been a few fish around, I guess, along with the amphipods, the isopods, the molluscs and the worms. I saw a few blokes slumped gloomily in tinnies, a handful of great cormorants and the contractual obligation pair of white faced heron in every cove and mudflat.

My ship building neighbour rates his sequence of ancient clapped out Mercedes according to the number of cows featured in the interior trim (“a two cow Merc”, “a four cow Merc” etc).  I’m thinking I should start rating my canoeing trips similarly, according to the number of white-faced herons I see during the day.  This Saturday was, by my calculation, at least a nine-heron day, and that’s not giving myself extra points for seeing the birds in pairs, hedgehog like in their full breeding regalia.

But all in all, there still plenty of solitude to be found out there in the mist.  I’m not sure, but I may have discovered a new form of white-water canoeing.  It may not be high-octane, but it’s got to be higher energy than watching Gabriel Gate on late night TV.  I think I like it.