Subject: Re: mystery cormorant
Date: Sep 26 12:16:01 1997
From: Michael Price - mprice at mindlink.bc.ca


Hi Tweets,

Dennis Paulson writes:

>The
>Cape Cormorant was one I strongly considered at the time of the sighting,
>but I eliminated it because the illustration in Harrison's seabird book,
>which was the only book I had that had all world cormorants in it, shows a
>black line running up the center of the yellow throat pouch. The mystery
>bird, of course, has no such line.

Dennis, there sometimes is a divergence between illustration and photograph
in Harrison's two books that arises from the somewhat stylised nature of the
illustrations. Most of the time, an identification doesn't hang in the
balance, so any divergences are merely inconvenient to mildly irritating.
There is one recent instance, though, where the difference between book
illustration and photograph in each of his books was the crucial factor in
assessing a possible first-record for the checklist area.

>Once I became convinced that it didn't
>match any living species, I just decided my camera and I must have been
>hallucinating and dropped my search.

Good thing this doesn't *ever* happen with bins and spotting scopes. '-)

>But the timing couldn't be better. I'm off to Africa in 10 days, and among
>other places we will be going to Cape Town, where Cape Cormorants are
>abundant. We even plan on going to a cormorantery, so I will have good
>close-range opportunities for photography and observation. That may settle
>it one way or another in my mind.
>If I'm convinced, I'll certainly publish
>the record somewhere, with a big (?) as to origin of the bird, which seems
>rather unlikely to get here on its own steam from just about halfway around
>the world. But darn; one life bird less in South Africa!

Don't retire that tick quite yet, Dennis. Cape Cormorant is in the books as
a pretty non-migratory species, so if that's what you decide it is, some
kind of human-assisted passage is the only way it would get here. In a
similar vein, imagine the astonishment of one observer on the west coast of
Vancouver Island when he saw what could only have been a penguin emerge from
the surf and waddle up the beach. There's been a number of sightings of
Galapagos Penguin (Spheniscus mendiculus) on the outer beaches of BC. Turned
out that boats in the Portugese fishing fleet would stop in at the Galapagos
to re-provision and sometimes the crews would pick up penguins as ship's
pets. By the time the fleet had reached the vicinity of BC waters, they'd
have tired of the birds and would heave them overboard. That's likely what
happened here.

Look forward to your eventual conclusion about this critter!

Michael Price The Sleep of Reason Gives Birth to Monsters
Vancouver BC Canada -Goya
mprice at mindlink.net