Brandt's Cormorants - a photo on Flickriver

            "The best part of a tidy few" was an understated expression my grandad used to mean there were a lot of something.  And there were certainly a lot of Brandt's Cormorants at the entrance to San Ignacio lagoon in Baja.  There was a broad raft of thousands of them in a sinuous line stretching for about a kilometer.  I had my long lens on as we passed so this was only part of it.  They are quite a common bird along the Pacific coast from Canada right down to Mexico, and are often seen in large flocks, but I have never seen a flock anything close to this one.  Not an example of photographic excellence but I quite liked the patterns formed by so many dark birds on pale water.

Now the Guanay Cormorant (Leucocarbo bougainvilliorum), that lives further down the Pacific coast off Peru, forms similar large flocks.  Almost unbelievably the orientation of birds in the flock changes to point frequently to point in the direction of ephemeral food sources.  Every Cormorant leaving the nearby breeding colony joins the raft for guidance before heading off to feed.  Most of these Brandt's Cormorants are facing the same way so I wonder if a similar thing is going on here?

The scientific name of Brandt's Cormorant is Urile penicillatus.  Urile comes from the local Russian word for Red-faced Cormorant from the North Pacific, while penicillatus means little brush from the facial eyebrow plumes in breeding plumage.  They were first described in 1837 by Johann Friedrich von Brandt (1802 –1879) was a German-Russian naturalist, who worked as director of the Zoological Museum of the St Petersburg Academy of Sciences.  He described several birds collected by Russian explorers off the Pacific Coast of North America, including Brandt's cormorant, red-legged kittiwake and spectacled eider.  Brandt's Bat (Myotis brandtii) is named in his honour though he did not describe or discover it.

Taken on: February 25, 2023

Tags:

Brandt's

Cormorant

penicillatus

Baja

large

raft

flock

Mexico

Tim Melling « less

Sets appears in: • Baja 2023

Stats: 4,009 views / 29 comments

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