Grooming Time

Cormorants, or shags as they are also called, and a random gull grooming themselves on the pontoon at the beach. The big brown seabird hogging the limelight front and centre is an immature shag.


In the middle of the day it's quiet down at the beach so the diving platform is where they like to hang and dry off their wings. It's hard to believe, looking at the number here, that DDT decimated the cormorant population in the 1960s. The recovery over the last thirty years has been so great that "management actions" (that's culling to the less euphemistically-inclined) have been championed. You can read more about that here. They are extremely poopy birds but they're graceful when skimming the water and fun to watch diving and catching fish in the Sound.