Double-crested and Pelagic Cormorants

Description

Cormorants (also called shags) are among the larger seabirds. There are three species of cormorants in the Chugach Region, of which only the Double-crested and Pelagic are common and widely distributed. Cormorants eat a variety of foods but prefer fish and crustaceans that reside towards the ocean floor. As such, they are excellent divers, having feathers that are not waterproof (so as not to be buoyant) and large, webbed feet to swim and hunt in the water. In between dives, they must spend time drying their feathers, often spreading their wings while roosting on rocks. Cormorants nest on coastal rocks and cliff ledges and, unlike other seabirds, do not venture far from their nesting colony. For most of the year, all three cormorants have dull gray-black colored plumage. But during the breeding season, their coloring becomes like a peacock’s which, in the right light, shines iridescent blue, green, or purple colors (Alutiiq Museum).

The Double-crested Cormorant gets its name from the two tufts of white feathers above their eyes that are only present during breeding. They are the largest of the three cormorants, measuring 28-35 inches in length with a wingspan of 4 feet (Alutiiq Museum). The dark coloring of their feathers gives a stark contrast to the orangey yellow skin on their face.

In contrast, Pelagic Cormorants are smaller, with very thin necks, a tiny head, and a slender bill. It is the smallest of these three cormorant species, measuring 25 to 35 inches 33in length with a wingspan of 3.3 feet. Pelagic cormorants have relatively short wings for their size due to their need for efficient movement underwater. It lives along the coasts of the northern Pacific but can also be found on the open ocean during winter. Breeding adults show large white hip patches in flight that Double-crested Cormorants do not have (Alaska Nature 2022).

Red-faced Cormorants (Urile urile) can look very similar to Pelagic Cormorants, although the latter is slightly larger with larger crests. Breeding adults are told apart by the naked facial skin that does not noticeably extend beyond the eye in Pelagic Cormorants but extends to above the bill and above and behind the eye in the Red-faced. Juveniles and nonbreeding adults of the two species are often indistinguishable when in mixed flocks (Alaska Nature 2022).

Habitat and Status

The Double-crested and Pelagic Cormorants are common residents in the Chugach Region; the Red-faced Cormorant is an uncommon local resident. The Double-crested Cormorant can be found along both inland waterways and coastal areas. They breed in the Aleutian Islands and on the southern coast during the summer and spend their winters on the southern coasts of British Columbia. Small inland colonies nest on islands in Cooper and Skilak Lakes on the Kenai Peninsula. During their time in Alaska, they built nests by stacking any plant material nearby, even stealing from neighboring nests if needed. Double-crested Cormorants aren’t picky about where they nest, anywhere from shrubs and trees, cliffs, the ground, or even manmade structures (Alaska Nature 2022). They do not stray far from their colonies and make a gargling sound when feeling threatened.

Double-crested Cormorant populations in the U.S. have generally increased in recent decades due to protection from hunting and the banning of DDT and other pesticides. In Prince William Sound, cormorant populations have not fully recovered from the Exxon Oil Spill; however, that is likely a consequence of depressed Pacific herring populations. Furthermore, in a warming climate, modeling by the Audubon Society suggests only 21% of the summer range of Double breasted Cormorants remains stable by 2080, shifting further north and into boreal forests. It’s uncertain if they will be able to adapt well to boreal forests (Audubon Society 2019). Pelagic Cormorants are expected to be less vulnerable to a warming climate, maintaining most of their current summer and winter range while expanding northward onto the Arctic Ocean coastline.

Distribution of Double-Crested Cormorants in the Chugach Region.

Cormorant skin parka. It took 150 cormorant neck skins to create a snow-falling parka, a style worn by Alutiiq dancers from Kodiak. Etholen Collection, National Museum of Finland.

Traditional Use

Cormorants were traditionally caught in a net of braided sinew or bull kelp stretched between their nests, a common practice prior to contact (Birket-Smith 1953). They were sometimes “caught” or clubbed at night on their nests or while roosting.

Cormorants appear in many comments from interviewed Elders. It’s said that cormorants cry out at night because they’re telling each other about their day. Another saying is that a bald person, a muqnilik, is only bald because a cormorant has vomited on their head (Birket-Smith 1953). Cormorants are indeed prodigious vomiters. Like many seabirds, they regurgitate fish to feed their young, but they also vomit when approached by predators or intruders such as humans, perhaps to drop weight in preparation for flight, but possibly also to distract their predators.

Cormorants were a source of food, and their feathered hides were valued for clothing, headdresses, and blankets. The radius and ulna of cormorants were used to make awls. Alutiiq people prized the smooth throat skin of the cormorant, which has a green iridescent sheen, for ceremonial parkas. It reportedly took 150 cormorant neck skins to create a snow-falling parka, the style of garment worn by many Alutiiq dancers today. Cormorant neck feathers are a beautiful shimmering black color and exceptionally smooth (Alutiiq Museum).

One chief’s daughter ¹ once owned a coat made of green cormorant (likely Pelagic) heads trimmed with sea-otter skin; the back was a sealskin (Birket-Smith 1953). Elders also recalled that some of the people before them used the skin from a “shag,” a cormorant, to make clothing. They would even leave the feathers on sometimes to add warmth. The late Chugach Elder John Klashnikoff talked about clothing made of shag skin:

“You’re in that skin boat…you know…it’s made outta seal skin, and they oiled that skin with every spring, see? With seal oil. Well, when you get into it, you would smell like a seal. ‘Course, you don’t smell it yourself anymore after a while, but boy! When you come home, and you…oh, man! You smell like it. So, we used to get up to the damn seals, lyin’ on the rocks, they won’t even move, and we slaughtered them, you know? Gol darn it!.…but they go with power skiffs now. You never see nothin’ no more. Them years, any place you went, they was waitin’ for you, there. You just had to shoot ‘em. Have the guns…you know…sit out on the rock, and wait for seals, and in half-hours time you…start comin’ in….They sleep on the rocks…you know…you go out there, and you stay there the night. You can’t hardly see ‘em…pretty soon see ‘em come up on the rock, right in front of them, and you catch ‘em. That’s the way they hunt their crows, too…you know…those shags…lotta them old people…not in my time, from before me, they used to wear skin clothes…like…all different kinds’a skin, and some…have made shag clothes…you know…just using these shags flying around…the black birds…you know…that flies out from a cliff, and they drop in the water, and then they take off. They’re just those big black shags, they call ‘em. I don’t know what they are. Well, they used to kill them, and make clothes out of ‘em.”

Cormorant wings have even been used to make an emergency shelter. In The Man and the Sea Lions, a traditional story told by Makari Chimovitsky, a man is abandoned on a rock out near the Sea Lion hunting grounds for the Tyaigyulik village. The sea is too rough for the hunting baidarkas to get to him, so he is left there by a man named Tanyurhangtyuk. When they finally reach him the next hunting season, they find he is living in a house made of cormorant wings. When he returns to his village, he finds that Tanyurhangtyuk has taken and married his wife. So Tanyurhangtyuk and his wife are invited to a feast, and when they arrive the man says to Tanyurhangtyuk, “You left me on the rock so you could take my wife. You can keep her now.” He then begins to cry out like the cormorant’s “rorr-rorr-rorr,” and Tanyurhangtyuk falls dead. He then takes his wife back to live as they did before (Birket-Smith 1953).

At the Nuchek village site, the Chugach people thought cormorants on their Porpoise Rocks looked like a Russian priest, standing tall and straight with a black robe on.