Great Cormorant

Fascinating facts about the Great Cormorant

• Unlike every other diving bird on Earth, cormorants have feathers that absorb water instead of repelling it. Most water birds' plumage traps air for buoyancy, but a cormorant trades floatation for control — their soaked feathers make them 20% heavier, letting them sink like a torpedo and chase fish at depths of up to 40 metres with barely any effort. This is why you see them hunched on rocks with wings spread: they're drying out, not sunbathing.
• A great cormorant's eyes are built for an underwater world humans can't access. On land, they're actually near-sighted and see the world in soft focus, but underwater their lens elongates and reshapes — a feature shared with no other bird in Europe — turning their eye into a precision hunting tool that tracks prey in murky rivers and coastal bays where visibility is just a few metres. Dive goggles are just cormorants' daily reality.
• For nearly a thousand years, Chinese fishermen trained cormorants to hunt for them, tying snares around their throats so they could swallow only small fish but had to return their larger catches to the boat. The practice nearly died out after the 1950s but persists on the Li River in Guangxi Province, where a handful of masters still use the technique on moonlit nights — one of the oldest human-animal partnerships that has survived into the modern era.
• Great cormorants are colonial breeders that gather in numbers that shock first-time observers: some colonies contain over 10,000 pairs crammed onto small islands or within a single forest of dead trees. The ammonia stench from their guano is so intense it kills vegetation below the colony — they create accidental dead zones that reshape landscapes, stripping forests bare and transforming freshwater lakes into ghostly stands of bleached wood.
• In the past 40 years, European cormorant populations have exploded from fewer than 10,000 birds to over 1.5 million, a recovery so complete it's become politically explosive. Anglers and fish farmers blame them for devastating catches, yet the recovery shows how a species written off as nearly extinct can return to historical numbers when protected — and how that success can flip a conservation win into a human conflict that governments still argue about today.

At a glance

About the Great Cormorant

As the Great Cormorant glides effortlessly across the water's surface, its sleek, serpentine body leaves barely a ripple in its wake, a testament to the mastery of its aquatic realm. With wings held aloft, it dives with precision, plummeting into the depths with a silence that belies the deadly intent of its pursuit, emerging moments later with a fish clutched triumphantly in its beak. In this fluid, almost ethereal dance, the Great Cormorant embodies the perfect union of form and function, a true marvel of evolutionary adaptation.

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