[Maine-birds] DC Cormorants and the eagle

I had one of those funny birding experiences tonight.

 

I was sitting in a Hallowell restaurant overlooking the Kennebec. As darkness gathered, I witnessed hundreds of crows gathering in the trees along the far shore. Hundreds of crows gathering to roost at dusk is not unusual, but I wondered why they would choose a spot along the water and so exposed to eagles. While I watched and pondered, another hundred came in and roosted.

 

Then I realized the distant birds were DC Cormorants, not crows, and furthermore, they were just arriving and probably unaccustomed to the local eagle population.

 

And then an eagle came in. He came in slowly in full view. The cormorants stayed steady in the trees until he was almost on top of them. They finally bolted. He dove and missed a couple of times. And that was it. The flock reformed on the water, slightly downstream, in a flock so tight that they were just one big difficult-to-individually-distinguish blob. A bunch of odd behaviors, but perfectly explainable once you understand that cormorants and eagles are quite familiar with each other. It was a spectacle the likes of which I have not seen before.

 

Bob Duchesne