Carbo the Cormorant

Being able to identify individual organisms adds incredible depth to the wildlife watching. It helps immerse you in their world and really care about their lives. I loved being able to watch my pair of swans VGY and ZNY. Their orange DARVIC tags made identifying them very easy and over time they came to accept me as much as I did them and would always swim over to see me and were much more tolerant of me around their cygnets than others. Sadly VGY and ZNY ae long passed and the local swans arent tagged anymore, it takes a lot of training to ring swans but I can still identify some by their facial markers. 

Likewise with Half-Tail the dominant fox on my trail cameras was a great individual to get to know. In many cases organisms all look alike and you need to spend an amazing amount of time with them to see the subtle signs. I have spent many hours trying to identify individual badgers on the trail cam but without definite features it can be very hard. The best kind of ID features are physical characteristics that are likely to be permanent, easy to see and unique, defects are often the best and it is such a defect that has helped me to identify an individual cormorant. 

This Cormorant I have named Carbo. Their distinctive feature is their beak. I have posted before about beak deformities (Read it here)and this week I not only saw a deformed Cormorant but a deformed beak Magpie!

Carbo can be identified by the fact that he is missing the tip of his upper mandible. I do not think this was a birth defect, it was probably caused by some kind of accident maybe a collision?

Cormorants are a fascinating species. To me they look so very primitive, I can see them around in the very earliest times of bird evolution. Its something about their very 'dinosaury' look. Their eyes seem very reptilian and their feathers form a kind of scale like pattern also they are less evolved than other waterbirds. They lack a waterproof coating to their feathers meaning that although they are excellent swimmers and underwater divers they must dry themselves out after each immersion. This is why they are commonly seen with wings outspread drying out. It was this cross like shape that endeared them to Knights, some of whom adopted them into their coats of arms.

Originally viewed as coastal birds Cormorants unlike their cousins, the Shag, have adapted to inland life. In fact, for almost all of their European range the Cormorant remains a coastal and estuarine habitats only in the UK do they spread right across the country.

Cormorants were first sighted at the Saxon Mill when I first started recording in 2003 with previous sightings being in Wales or at Brandon Marsh. Over the years they have become an increasingly common sight. This year they have been even more prevalent and over the past few weeks a regular visitor. Carbo has a preference for the upstream stretch of the river and in the picture above loves to sit on a perch a top an old dead tree on the opposite bank.

This week I spotted Carbo fishing in the river and then again perched on his second favourtite perch, an old stump in the river. I know this is where Carbo comes regularly given the large white guano stains on the trunk.

In this photo we can see Carbo a little closer up. This photo was taken on the 18th April, about a month since the other photo and we can now see that they have entered breeding plumage as evidenced by the white patch on the side, something that I had never noticed on a Cormorant before. I keep using the pronoun 'They' as it is very hard to sex a Cormorant.

The beak deformity doesn't seem to have been hampering Carbo even through it means he has lost the hooked beak tip. There are plenty of fish in the Avon, Carbos presence along with otter and heron attest to this and as I see young cormorant most autumns it is likely that they breed somewhere along this stretch, it is my guess that it is a little further up river.

Being able to identify Carbo means that I may be able to find out more about their life and come to understand them better.

The Sparrow and the Feather - Accounting for Thought.

 

All kinds of things can trigger deep thoughts in me, many of these thoughts are often nonsensical and sometimes not suitable for broadcast but quite often a chance observation will lead me down a rabbit hole into areas I never considered before, one such event occurred this past week.

Mr Sparrow (c) M. Smith

I was sat in my back garden watching the comings and goings of the local bird life. As is often the case I was drawn to the activity of the local sparrows how mob the garden in little ‘wannabe’ gangs chattering excitedly like school kids or squabbling, well like school kids too. They are social birds and seem to have an enthusiasm for life, they strike me a plucky and at times self-important. I was pondering their character when I was drawn to a particularly dapper male Sparrow who had landed on the fence with a feather firmly gripped in his beak. This was an exciting turn of events. Sparrows nest well in my area and use a nest box on the side of the house. Last year I installed a camera to one of the terraces rooms and unsurprisingly no sparrow decided to use it. This year I hoped for more success although at present the camera does not seem to be working! Perhaps if I watched this male, he would reveal which box they were going to use this year?

He seemed incredibly proud of his feather. He stood boldly on the fence waving it around and repositioning it in his beak to gain maximum purchase in the light breeze. He was pleased to have found himself such a premium piece of nesting material, I was surprised then when his behaviour suddenly changed. As he looked around him, no doubt looking to display his find to receptive females and brag to the other males his gaze alighted on the bird feeder. Instantly his demeanour changed, he dropped the feather and fluttered down to one of the perches. He stuck his head in and took a few beak fulls of seed before flying off. He did not look for his lost feather or even show any awareness that he had even had one in the first place. It was if seeing the food overrode his previous behaviour and excised it from his awareness.

So, what then was going through the sparrow’s mind. It led to me to think about the depth of intelligence such an animal might have. Was the sparrow just a flesh and blood automaton operating purely on an innate system of stimulus and response pathways, on the larger scale is that all that we humans are? Had I seen evidence of two competing innate systems going head-to-head in a priority led battle for survival?

The sparrow, I reasoned, had received the signals of day length and temperature, and responded biologically with hormonal changes to begin the mating sequence. Mating is a strong imperative in all species and particularly in humans can lead to levels of extreme stupidity. The sparrow had started nest collecting behaviour, the collection of the feather was evidence of this, and he had done well. The feather was A grade nesting material, with excellent thermal properties and incredibly soft, Mrs Sparrow would be impressed. However, had the sight of food initiated a different neural pathway that prioritised survival over reproduction, you cannot after all, reproduce if you have starved to death!

Mrs Sparrow (c) M.Smith

During my undergraduate dissertation I studied optimal foraging theory in woodland birds and whilst the outcome of my studies were embarrassingly naive it did leave me with some insight into the complex cost benefit analysis birds undertook to balance energy gain and energy use on a daily, even on a minute-to-minute basis. What then of choice and intelligence? Was a measure or mark of intelligence the ability to choose to override an innate response. Was this what humans did? Was this ability, this flexibility, a competitive advantage that allowed other organisms to survive in new and exciting ways?

Ironically, the New Scientist has just run an article on animal intelligence, I had just finished reading Peter Godfrey-Smith’s excellent book, Other minds: The Octopus and the Evolution of Intelligent Life and Chris Packham’s BBC series on Animal Einstein’s had just finished airing, something that perhaps helped channel my thoughts and highlighted the difficulty of assessing intelligence even in human species let alone between those of different genera, families, or classes.

Alongside raw problem solving these is a question of culture and continual mental block humans place on research, always placing ourselves at the top of the tree or at the centre of any level of supremacy. We are the benchmark upon which all else is measured but given the breadth of life is this true? We count ourselves at the pinnacle and yet our species is very new and short lived one in geological speaking. Bacteria have been surviving relatively unchanged for hundreds of millennia, they are more diverse than mammals and able to survive over a broader range of environments. It is our own perceptions that can blinker is to what the sparrow is thinking. Are the sparrows through processes nothing more than a sequence of NOT, AND, and OR gates and if so, are our own thought processes any different all be it more complex and confounded by self-identity and self-absorption.

One only needs to lock eyes with an animal to experience a kinship, some level of understanding, something that changes as we move through the species. I have never ‘had a moment’ when staring into a Bees eyes. A mammal’s core experiences are not that dissimilar to ours after all once you distil it down. Birds however are a step removed, their 3D awareness from flight and different perceptual mechanisms perhaps removes them more from our frame of reference. After all, when caring for injured birds I have had such moments of connections although this could just have been projection on my part.

At the end of the day, we cannot be sure what our nearest and dearest are thinking so why expect to be able to do so for another taxon. Is this pursuit of understanding futile? Maybe, but it is a fascinating journey, nevertheless.