The All Blacks

A serpent in the water, a pair of wings hung out to dry, a fish thief. Derek Niemann introduces the cormorant, a bird that provokes strong, often contradictory emotions.

- Derek Niemann

Do cormorants have an easy life? They seem to be nature’s posers, sitting around for hours at a time in full view, loitering on a sandbank or an islet, the wild equivalents of a street corner, indifferent to their surroundings and the people staring at them.

Studies show that members of the cormorant family spend up to 90 percent of their time roosting or ‘loafing’. Our species, Phalacrocorax carbo – often called the great cormorant – is the most widespread of them all, found on every continent bar South America. It shares the apparent inclination of its fellows towards indolence and the tendency to sit out in the open in groups, like a pride of dozy lions, making it one of our most easily observable birds.

On an exposed perch, a cormorant is the selfie on a stick. And it seems this bird is comfortably at home in both town and country: a metal handrail works as well as a branch for a perch, a pylon does as a tree, fish in a city reservoir are just as desirable as those from a rural river.

Cormorants are ungainly, ugly, statuesque, beautiful. Watch one crash-land into the shallows before the beach, waddle up the shore on oversized webbed feet, splay its tail on the ground and cock its bill at a graceless angle. A flick of the wrist unfolds its wings into the classic stance, like a bentarmed version of the Angel of the North. It stands, wings out, for minutes at a time, tilting them to catch the breeze and dry its feathers.

SINISTER SYMBOL

Our ancestors were unnerved. Poet John Milton cast Satan in