Dem's shags aka Cormorants

Double-crested Cormorant hangs his wings out to dry at Tobin Lake. John Madsen photo

Were Double-crested Cormorants around 40-50 years ago? I don't remember seeing them during the first 30-some years of my life before we moved to BC where we lived for 25+ years. And now over the years since we returned to Saskatchewan, we see them every summer at one lake or another.

It was my sister Evelyn who first pointed them out to me. We had just moved back to the province when she asked me about a strange big duck she had seen on a slough just east of Humboldt - a black duck with an S-shaped neck, sitting on the bank with its beak in the air. She even drew me a little sketch - and she is a good artist. Well, it certainly didn't look like any duck I'd ever seen so I silently handed her my Peterson guide. In just a few moments, she gave the "aha" cry, her finger jabbing at the Double-crested Cormorant.

Evelyn and I are from a family of nine siblings who grew up at a one-house-one-elevator siding south of Meacham. While I married a roamer and bounced around the country, she married a farmer north of Viscount (about 10 miles from home) and has always lived in the area, retiring later to Humboldt and Arizona. If she hadn't seen a Double-crested Cormorant in all those years, where were they?

I found part of the answer in the June 2010 Blue Jay - the Nature Saskatchewan publication (it comes free with your membership). An article by Christopher M.Somers et al about pelican and cormorant population trends in Saskatchewn over five decades explains that historically both species were relatively rare here. (No wonder I was so excited as a child to see a pelican.) But populations of both have dramatically increased over the past 30 years or so. According to the article, they don't know "whether recent growth represents a resurgence to pre-human settlement numbers, or an usual range and population expansion triggered by as yet unexplained biological events."

Cormorants were apparently severely affected by the infamous DDT spray of the 1940s and 50s, but unlike the beloved pelican, these ugly step-sisters were not put on the "threatened with extinction list" even though there were five times as many pelican nests counted as cormorant nests.

Fishermen love to hate cormorants who dive for fish and see their increasing  population
as the reason that fewer fish end up on hooks and in nets. The Blue Jay article, however, suggests it's man who has over-exploited the top-predator fish like wall eye and pike and in turn, this means there are more bottom feeders that are prey for cormorants but of no value to fishermen. I'm not sure a cormorant diving for dinner would pass by a young pickerel to go get a sucker instead, but then I'm not a cormorant nor a biologist.

It's not just local fishermen who dislike cormorants. When we were on holiday in the Maritimes a few years ago we heard them referred to most unflatteringly as "dem **** shags." In addition to Double-Crested Cormorants with their orange throat patches, off Cape Breton we also saw the larger Great Cormorant with its white throat patch.

Okay, so everybody likes to hate cormorants, but I still have this wonderful memory from last summer, standing on the deck of a restaurant at Tobin Lake early in the evening watching a long line of cormorants streaming low over the water like an aerial freight train.