Ideas - Champions of cormorants argue the water bird is unfairly vilified

Episode Date: May 20, 2025

It's not them, it's you. That's what fans of the cormorant argue, pointing out how people see the gangly aquatic bird all wrong. This common bird has gained a bad reputation by irritating communities with its large colonies, extreme fishing habits and tree-killing excrement. But defenders suggest maybe it's humans and their cultural assumptions that are the source of the problem. They say it's time for people to re-evaluate their perception of cormorants and acknowledge their beauty and worth. *This episode originally aired on October 6, 2021.

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Okay, here's today's show. I'm Nala Ayed and this is Ideas. Why is it that we're drawn to some creatures more than others? Cat and dog people abound. Cheetahs and monkeys are a meme a minute. Even sharks get a whole TV week devoted to them. So why does one bird lose the popularity contest? Cormorants seem to be a very divisive bird. Cormorants for many people aren't, they're not a charismatic species. They're not on any logos of environmental organizations.

They've been the, how should I say, scourge of my existence. I think cormorants are almost like an imaginary thing. It's an ancient association of the cormorant with all things sinister. It's almost like a boogeyman and it's hard to empathize with the boogeyman. It's almost like a bogeyman and it's hard to empathize with the bogeyman. In this episode, considering, actually reconsidering, the cormorant. A bird with peculiarities, to be sure, but one that wears feathers of our making, cloaked in human history, imagination, and prejudice. Here is contributor Ruth Jones with her documentary

13 Ways of Looking at a Cormorant. They mass together by the thousands on lake shores and seacoast motionless Extending their great dark wings to dry in the Sun They're croaking grunting cries sound more like pigs or reptiles or aliens anything but birds pigs or reptiles or aliens, anything but birds. Their long necks have been compared to snakes, necks that allow them to swallow fish whole. Enough fish, according to the cormorants. A good amount of fish, according to the scientists. Too many fish, according to fishermen.

We don't know precisely how much they eat or much about their habits. We don't know how numerous they've been in the past. Here's what we do know. They are ancient. Their bodies are similar to the first modern birds, a shape that emerged 120 million years ago. There are six species in North America, all medium-sized black birds with long necks and hooked bills that perch on trees and other high places and die for fish not too far from land. The most numerous are the double-crested cormorants, of which there are today somewhere on the order of one million.

When they almost disappeared in the middle of the 20th century, no one seemed to miss them. And when they came back, people wanted them gone. For hundreds of years in the West, the cormorant has been seen as an avian enemy. Greedy thieves, tree-killing interlopers, ravenous, ugly pests. Strong feelings about cormorants are expressed not only in real life, but in art and literature too, from Lafontaine's fable about a cormorant who tricks all the fish into becoming his dinner, to one of the most famous works of the English Renaissance.

Milton uses a cormorant in a very prominent position in Paradise Lost. The cormorant is actually a symbol, a metaphor for Satan. When Satan arrives in the Garden of Eden, he lands on a tree, the Tree of Life, and looks around to get his bearings. And the narrator comments about him there. I could read the four lines that are relevant. Thence up he flew, and on the tree of life, the middle tree, and highest there that grew, sat like a cormorant. Yet not true life thereby regained, but sat devising death. I'm Karen Edwards. I'm Professor of Renaissance Literature at the University of Exeter in England. Karen has spent her career thinking and writing about how the authors she studies represent animals,

whether naturalistically or symbolically, what they mean to us culturally. And in the works of many of those authors, and Milton in particular, animals stand in for ideas about good and evil. Satan actually is likened to a number of creatures in paradise lost. A wolf, of course he takes on the form of a snake later on, but he also inhabits the bodies of other animals to essentially spy out Eden, to get closer to Adam and Eve without their being suspicious. But this is one of the very first images of him.

By using the cormorant this way, Milton reverses another biblical image. The cormorant, you could say, is an infernal version of one of the images that's used of Christ, which is Christ as a fisher of men. The cormorant is also a fisher, a voracious and efficient predator, and actually is, instead of fishing in order to save human beings the way Christ is, Milton makes it clear that Satan is a cormorant, is fishing for men in order to devour their souls. in order to devour their souls. Paradise Lost is as much a political story as a religious one. The plot might be Adam and Eve, but the message is about overthrowing a false king. It's a poem born of England's civil war, which makes the cormorant a political metaphor too, and one found elsewhere in literature. They were also used by Shakespeare as images of greedy politicians. Cormorants and caterpillars

were seen as unscrupulous, voracious devourers of the common good. Politicians, in other words, would use their high positions to better themselves. I'll make my heaven to dream upon the crown. Richard III was called an insatiate cormorant. And yet I know not how to get to the crown. Shakespeare in Coriolanus speaks of the cormorant belly. Cormorant became an adjective for greedy or voracious, almost automatically and is very often associated with politicians. They should, Shakespeare wrote, by the cormorant belly be restrained. These negative associations

build up over time. They become a shorthand. They absorb their context. It's an ancient association, the Cormorant, with, well, with all things sinister. Although translations differ, the King James version of the Bible includes the cormorant amongst the unclean fowls in Leviticus and Deuteronomy. Probably it has to do with the fact that cormorants and birds of prey eat meat. They eat fish and carrion. And apparently, or at least one theory theory is to those who wrote the Bible

considered that unnatural for a bird but the word unclean of course is a very powerful one. That reputation of uncleanliness, contamination, sticks to the cormorant into the present day. Its color seems also to work against it. Not white or blue or green or gray, but black. There also seems to be a very, very long-standing association of black birds with ill omens. The corvids, particularly crows, ravens, cormorants have a very bad reputation as somehow forecasting some misfortune. The name cormorant, it comes from words that means sea raven or sea crow.

That in itself is already a danger signal. Crows and ravens particularly were seen as birds of ill omen. That seems to have been true also in classical antiquity. It really does go way back. In Aristotle's History of Animals, he calls the cormorant hydrocorax, a water raven. The Greeks and Romans saw signs in birds. In the direction they flew in, their number, their song, omens could be good or bad.

Cormorants, like the inauspicious raven, croak and lurk like feathery shadows. The shape of the cormorant, it's a very lean bird, and when it has its wings outspread, it typically likes to perch on rather prominent high places and it looks, it's a bit frightening the way it looks with its wings outspread and it will often stay still for quite a while, perching as if it's brooding or something like that. So its color, its shape, the

fact that it stays still, even its horse cry, all of those things somehow contribute to its reputation as forecasting evil in some ways. It's just bad luck, you know, to run into a cormorant. Critic John Berger has said that animals first entered the imagination as messengers and promises. In European thought, their meaning was shaped by centuries of a Christian worldview. For a long time, I would say for centuries before really the advent of the revolution in understanding the natural world. This is a very rough generalization.

The natural world was seen as God's second book. The Bible was the first book, but the natural world was held to be God's other book. And it was possible to read as if animals and plants were words or scriptures. You could read those and understand God's plans for humanity. We could learn from the creatures if we studied them. It's just that very often what was taken to be the nature of these creatures was somehow biased in such a way as to make them conform to the lessons that they were supposed to embody. So the poor old cormorant is partly a victim of that way of reading animals.

But then something shifted. When explorers and naturalists began to look at animals as creatures worthy of study in their own right, they were often surprised at the difference between what they expected to find and what they actually find. Animals became less metaphorical, and the cormorant could be seen on its own weird terms. The cormorant was particularly interesting because it nested in trees, which is not what one would expect really of a sea bird. But of course the cormorant is also slightly unusual in that it is at home in freshwater as well as saltwater. And of course there's the fact that it does seem to need to dry its feathers. Again, very unusual. Also its shape is so strange, you know, with that very torpedo-like body, but those big feet. So

that it's a combination of gracefulness and clumsiness, you know. This particular grace and water, and the cormorant skill at fishing, were perhaps the only things that challenged the all-encompassing badness of its reputation. Over the centuries, we have even paid the bird a kind of backhanded respect by letting it fetch our supper. James I had domesticated trained cormorants for fishing purposes. So the cormorants had rings around their necks and would swim underwater. They're like torpedoes underwater and grab fish

and not exactly swallow them. The ring prevented that, but they would bring the fish back to land. James was so enamored of this idea of cormorants that he actually appointed someone as the keeper of the cormorants. The keeper traveled even as far as Italy with birds for possibly for other monarchs. And not only for kings.

Fishing by train cormorants is a practice that continues right up into the present day in Europe and in Asia, where Chinese and Japanese traditions are over a thousand years old. But for the naturalists of a few centuries ago, it was a revelation to find that cormorants didn't need to work as either fishing servants or literary metaphors. They were worthy as a bird species to be observed and noted for their habits and behaviors. It's very loyal to its nesting site, its roosting site. There are stories of cormorants returning to a single area of a forest for hundreds of years.

Of course, that creates its own problem because their guano then eventually often kills the tree that they nest on or roost on. But the Cormorant turned out to be a fascinating bird to naturalists in the late 17th century, early 18th century, so that because it was so interesting as a bird, its old reputation, which Milton draws on as a fowl, doesn't quite hold up any longer. That should have been good news for the cormorant. Just a common bird, free of associations. It didn't work out that way.

The U.S. has undertaken a depredation order that was issued about 15 years ago, and they've killed over half a million cormorants. A grim reality for cormorants and those who study them. I'm Gail Fraser. Gail is a behavioral ecologist. I'm a professor at York University in the Faculty of Environmental and Urban Change and I study double-crested cormorants. For almost 15 years she's paddled out to a camouflage shelter, a duck blind, in Lake Ontario. There she watches the habits of

a large colony of cormorants at the Leslie Street Spit, a slim arm of land that stretches out into the lake. It's a favourite of Toronto cyclists and picnickers, and a specific kind of cormorant. There are many species of cormorants across the world. There's a couple of other species that are lower in abundance than North America, but double-crested cormorants are the most in the most abundance. And they breed across North America. All over the continent.

And so they nest on the Pacific Ocean, they nest on the Atlantic Ocean, they nest on the Gulf of Mexico, and they also nest in the Great Lakes. And they're what we would call as a colonial nesting water bird. So these are birds that nest in colonies. If there are a lot of cormorants in the area, the colonies can be quite large. This year, there were just under 11,000 nesting pairs at the colony where Gale works. The cormorants' abundance, along with their perceived feeding and nesting habits, has resulted in a deadly backlash from humans.

There has been some lethal controls that have gone on in different parts of Canada, like Saskatchewan and Quebec and Ontario. So there's been some kind of very heavy-handed management that has gone on on the species. And yet the bird's survival was in question not so long ago, also thanks to humans. Cormorants have gone from, they were at an all-time low in the 60s because of pollutants

in the Great Lakes and elsewhere. They live at the top of the, close to the top of the food chain and so they were very susceptible to DDT and PCBs that were being put out into the world by humans and they really crashed. The effects on cormorant chicks were gruesome. The chicks that were being produced were deformed chicks that had crossed bills so they were unable to eat. So they were at an all-time low such that they were considered to be endangered in some places. And then we figured some stuff out, right, as humans. We reduced these pollutants. Cormorants were added to the migratory bird act in the U.S. So there were some protection measures and they started to recover. And

the recovery was really quite dramatic. Like they went from having, virtually being extirpated in the Great Lakes to now having, you know, over a hundred000, around 100,000 nests in all of the Great Lakes. Take the spot on Lake Ontario where Gail Frazier does her research. There was a handful of nests and then the numbers started growing exponentially like they did in other places. And because cormorants kill trees, they were quickly modifying the habitat of this human-made peninsula. So when I arrived on the scene in 2006-2007, the Toronto and Region Conservation Authority was getting complaints from the public about the cormorants. So the cormorants smell, they're killing the trees, those were

the primary complaints for the park. The cormorant's grano, its feces, is acidic. It kills vegetation where they nest, those trees that humans like to see when they cycle and picnic by a lake. The public has very strong opinions when they see something change dramatically, like when trees change, when forests die because of Cormorant nesting, they think, change when forests die because of cormorant nesting, they think, oh, this is bad. But from a large scale perspective, it has been argued in some work on great cormorants in Europe that they're introducing habitat heterogeneity. Just like beavers turning streams into dams and pools, cormorants turn forests into open

land. It's different, but it's still habitat. It's still a place where animals live, just different ones. But we're using waterfront land for towns and cities and agriculture. We want our few parks left alone, particularly a human-made spit of land by a big urban center on a great lake. Humans have deforested most of southern Ontario and now we have these priceless us green spaces and then an agent of change like cormorants arrives and we think ah this is this is not good. There is something scientists call wildlife acceptance capacity.

How many of one animal species people see as a good number? Think of a hundred rats compared to a hundred bunny rabbits. A swarm of butterflies versus a swarm of hornets. We accept more of the creatures that we like and the most of those we love. We do not love cormorants. I have a sailboat in Toronto and I live on a sailboat here in Outer Harbour and there's a lot of cormorants on Leslie's bed. People think they're hyperabundant or too abundant. They've been the, how shall I say, scourge of my existence. And because we do not love them, because they are seen as, at best, nuisance, the way we

look at them leans into that good number. Even when we take a scientific view, what we often think of as a neutral or at least a rational view, we look at cormorants in terms of how, when there are a lot of them, they bother us. I think, you know, one of the interesting things about science is that sometimes it fills a need, right? So you go and try and answer questions that are specific to the perceived need. So around cormorants, there's been a lot of focus on their ecology as it relates to the conflicts. For example,

if there's a perceived conflict that cormorants are quote unquote eating all the fish, there's been studies that have examined well, what is the cormorant diet? Like what species are they eating? How many are they eating? When are they eating them? Science can help us quantify our conflicts with cormorants. But if we're only looking at conflicts, Gale argues, we're ignoring what cormorants might be without us.

We're still looking at the imaginary bird." Literary scholar Karen Edwards empathizes with the cormorant. It cannot seem to outlive its reputation. Even if people don't know Paradise Lost or don't really read Chaucer much anymore, somehow there's a sense that there's something bad about this bird. It's almost like a kind of a folk memory that gets passed down somehow. I would almost be tempted to say through our genes, but that would be completely unscientific and not true. In his 2013 book, The Devil's Cormorant, the maritime historian Richard King traces the world's cormorants from his home in Connecticut all the way to Antarctica.

Along the way, he finds very few stories that show the bird in a positive light. One of those is fictional. A short story by the Irish writer Liam O'Flaherty, The Wounded Cormorant. On the great rock there was a flock of black cormorants resting, bobbing their long necks to draw the food from their swollen gullets. The tale is simple. A cormorant, injured by a falling rock, struggles in pain, is attacked by its flock, gets dashed against a cliff, and dies. It's stark but also sad. We feel sorry for the cormorant, who's just unlucky. As far as I have been able to find, writes King, the wounded cormorant is the first piece of poetry

or prose in English that not only considers cormorants carefully, but also has these animals as the moral center of the tale. You're listening to a documentary about cormorants by contributor Ruth Jones. Ideas is a podcast and a broadcast. Heard on CBC Radio 1 in Canada, across North America, on SiriusXM, in Australia, on ABC Radio National, and around the world at cbc.ca.ideas. Find us on the CBC Listen app and wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Nala Ayed. It was over 30 years ago that Clifford Olson first called me. Secret phone calls from Canada's most notorious serial killer. I knew I was killing the children but I couldn't stop myself.

Now it's time to unearth the tapes because I believe there are still answers to be found. I'm Arlene Bynum from CBC's Uncover, Calls from a Killer, available now. Filthy, greedy, a stand-in for evil itself. That's how cormorants are depicted in literature. And their reputation is not much better in real life. They're seen as destructive pests. Yet those closest to the bird argue that cormorants are misperceived, that they are admirable creatures in their way.

Striking, resilient, strong, able to swim and dive and fly thousands of kilometers on their yearly migrations. To some, they even have their charms. Ecologist Gail Fraser studies cormorants. They come back in March and early April and they do this very goofy display. They have a long neck so they pull in their head and they tilt it up so their eyes are looking forward but their heads tilted up and then they put up their long black stiff tail and then they do what's called a wing waving display and so they beat their wings and they go whoo whoo whoo, whoo, whoo,

and it carries for a really long distance. It's like, I'm available, come check me out. And so when the prospective mate arrives, they entwine their necks and look in each other's mouths. And in their mouth is this brilliant turquoise blue. in their mouth is this brilliant turquoise blue. Our own relationship with this bird could be a more hopeful story. If we can just figure out why we see them as we do and how to see them in their entirety. Ideas contributor Ruth Jones is on the case with her documentary, 13 Ways of Looking

at a Cormorant. Here we go again. Ontario is going into its third state of emergency while a second stay-at-home order kicks in at midnight. In Toronto, where Gail Fraser saw those courting cormorants, last spring overlapped with a stay-at-home order. I can't stress this enough. Things are extremely, extremely serious right now. And I'm extremely concerned.

Nature provided a respite from the COVID fear. People noticed the robins in the neighbourhoods. The return of birdsong. Cheerful reports on owls, wood ducks, and warblers even made the news. But not, of course, the cormorants. Cormorants for many people aren't, they're not a charismatic species. That we ignore them is a plain fact to one avian observer who lives and works in the American South. A place steeped in natural and human history, the deep legacy of racism.

He sees a disregard for the cormorant among bird watchers there. A disregard and maybe worse. They're not a species that many people are sort of rushing to get on their lists. You know, they would say, well, I've seen one cormorant, I've seen them all. Now, it doesn't take much of a leap to have heard that in racist conversation. My name is Jay Drew Lanham, and I am the alumni distinguished professor of wildlife ecology and a conservation and cultural ecologist at Clemson University in Clemson, South Carolina. Drew is a writer too. I'm also the poet laureate of Edgefield, South Carolina and the author of The Homeplace Memoirs of a Colored Man's Love Affair with Nature, Sparrow Envy, A Field Guide to Birds to birds and lesser beasts, and forthcoming range maps, birds,

blackness, and loving nature between the two. Many think of nature as a neutral space, a relief, a respite from human bias and politics. But culture shapes our experience, and our experience shapes how we see and perceive the natural world. It's all about prisms for me. And prisms are obviously these optical structures that bend light. And so when we think about sort of the light spectrum and what we see, depending on the angle of the prism, depending on the intensity of the light, it sort of bends and refracts in different ways.

And so I like to think of ethnicity, race, all of the ways that we can identify ourselves as prisms that bend the viewpoint of nature. In other words, for Drew, each person comes to nature through all parts of their identity. And that identity affects how we interpret and imagine our relationships with wild animals and wild places, just as it does with other humans. For example, for me as a black southern man, that light nature is bent through the prisms of what my ancestors endured as enslaved, as segregated, subjugated people. So I may see a landscape, a wild landscape, and the birds that inhabit it in a very different way than someone who hasn't had those sorts of experiences or those prisms through which to bend birds and nature.

Comorants are viewed as a local nuisance where Drew lives. It's the usual set of complaints, depleting fish docks, killing trees. But there's another kind of irritation too. Duck hunting in South Carolina is indeed a very popular sport. Good many thousand of our citizens who are hunters pursue ducks for sport. People are used to seeing both inland and coastly these large flocks of black birds that sometimes are confused with waterfowl. And so because they are sometimes confused with waterfowl, they're sometimes shot by hunters. Cormorants are derided with a racial slur. And learning that they have this derisive name of n***goose in the waterfowl blind,

but also that's cited in an ornithology text, leads one to instantly, with that name association, to think, well, how would a bird come by this name? And the bird comes by the name in part because they are black and then that they are perceived to dupe hunters into wasting effort and time on them as birds who would have you believe that they are worthy. The blackness of the cormorant has played into its status as a negative symbol in literature. Like the raven and crow, its blackness gets equated with badness. It shouldn't surprise us when we see that bleeding over into real life perceptions of the bird too.

Blackness in itself is problematic for lots of people. I always ask the question. I ask friends to name the the white birds that are persecuted that could be killed en masse and and not have some sort of protest. I mean they're arguments now in some cities about culling mute swans. So if a single swan is culled, there are likely going to be outcries about that one bird, that one beautiful white fairy tale of a bird that is non-native, that does present issues to human safety even, but to certainly other species on the waterways in which it exists. Drew questions what it means to judge a species, to call one welcome and beautiful and another a pest.

Killing one swan versus killing 10, 15, 20,000 cormorants. So I want you to imagine if someone were to graphically display those thousands of cormorants hung up by their necks dead and then one swine, I would love to see the reactions when people see those black bodies dead or even one versus that one white body dead. And so those are the blind spots that frequently, again, sort of go unnoticed. We don't talk about them because, again, this is a bird that no one would ever think of as being important, maybe on their lists or from a conservation standpoint. After all, there are plenty of cormorants out there, right? For Drew, it reminds us that we can't think about conservation without questioning what we're trying to conserve.

What gets our attention? And so even though, and it's curious to me Ruth, even though it's a native species, right? And you'll hear many people talk about protecting native species. It's a native species that many people don't care about. And so again, I go all the way back to that pejorative Nick Goose and understanding that it's still in duck blinds. Understanding that people are still using it. That it has come down through decades as the way that people see these birds. And that thousands and thousands of them can be killed without concern for the conservation of the species. You know, as a black man that's not a big leap to say wow, right? Here is a bird that gets no respect in

many ways, that has been endangered by environmental contaminants, that has experienced this persecution. That's how I connect those cultural dots through that bird. And so it becomes important for me as a way to tell the story of how blackness in itself can lead to this disrespect and this devaluation. What do you want them to understand about your life as a black man? I just, I'm as equal as anybody else, you know what I'm saying? I'm as comparable or as valuable as anybody else in the world.

To see Cormorants through Drew's eyes is to see the natural history of blackness and the human history of blackness as the same story. From the deep history of slavery to a young Black Lives Matter protester and in the lives of those who live with environmental inequities. From Louisiana to Michigan and beyond. We found out as time went on that we were living on a toxic landfill because they discovered like 152 different chemicals. We will not allow one county to become a dump site.

Flint, Michigan has been synonymous with tainted water. It affects the way that we cook, the way that we brush our teeth. Drew, a poet as well as a conservationist, finds a parallel between one black bird and his own black life. He sees himself in the cormorant and feels for it. There was a time when cormorants garnered public sympathy. When they were dying out in the 1950s and 60s, one cormorant chick became a poster child for PCB poisoning and the Great Lakes. Her name was Cosmos. Her beak malformation made it hard for her to eat. She made 16 television appearances and died at 13 weeks. People presumably felt something for Cosmos,

but that was decades ago. At what point in time do we recognize the value of a species? Is it when there are so few left that there's one in an aviary cage somewhere that has to be named? And then people are filing by as they would file by a corpse at a funeral to say their goodbyes. Conservationists and ecologists try to get us

to see past our misperceptions and blind spots, to see the cormorant in focus, to appreciate the bird. Joining them is at least one artist, someone who sees beauty and poetry in the cormorant. I find them beautiful. I think sometimes when people sit, like they hear themselves saying they're ugly, but if you've ever looked, really looked at a cormorant,

they're quite stunning. Like beautiful black feathers, gorgeous blue eyes, like really, really striking. The point I'm trying to make here is that in this case, empathy has to be looked for. You have to work a little harder for it. And that's what the art does. My name is Cole Swanson, and I'm a Toronto-based artist who works at the intersections between humanity and nature. Kohl's work focuses on creatures that don't seem to have much value. The chickens that end up on special at your meat counter, the housefly, and cormorants.

Species we perceive as entirely other from us. Like ecologist Gail Fraser, he got interested in cormorants on the Leslie Street Spit in Toronto. At the time I was working on the spit in 2017, there were all of these newspaper articles coming out talking about cormorants and how you know they're taking over the land and they're eating all the fish and it was running parallel with stories that were coming out around politics of refugees and I thought what was quite maybe disturbing was that some of the conversations that we're having in the comment section around refugees, some of the intolerances that the general public

seemed to be expressing around taking in refugees, were really, really similar to the kinds of comments that were being made about cormorants, which is that they are taking over resources. And of course, neither of these comments, these comment threads, were really based on research, or really based on a three-dimensional understanding of what's really happening in these situations. Quo saw a parallel, not a metaphor. But what was really interesting was that they were both apparent outsiders.

They were embodiments of the other, almost more of an imaginary organism or an imaginary agent in society than what was really happening. So Cole started looking at the reality of the cormorant, really looking, and what he saw impressed him. I was just completely bowled over by their evolutionary prowess. You know, they're these incredible organisms that can fly well, they tree perch, they nest on the ground if they need to, they swim beautifully. They're like this perfectly engineered organism that is just ancient. And for me that was just too fascinating to pass up the opportunity to spend more time with them.

For two years Cole has worked with the cormorants on the spit, finding ways to interact with them, getting them to participate in his art, which eventually takes the form of multimedia installations, the sound. He's found that cormorants are timid. When a humid approaches they're likely to take off. When they're startled they vomit. So like Gale Fraser he sets up a duck line to hide himself or watches them with cameras. One thing he does is put out different colored objects instead of cameras to watch what the birds take. Cormorants use lots of things to build their nests. They're really cute when they're doing it. I mean, that's a very human response, but it's true.

They kind of waddle up and they pick up these objects and toss them side to side. If they don't like something, they chuck it. It's really endearing. And I think that's something that art does, right? It brings in multiple systems of knowledge, multiple systems of communication. And it's not necessarily tied to the science. It can be about the sacred, it can be about the spiritual if it needs to be.

And I think that's all in here. We see cormorants at land level, standing on rocks, drying themselves, moving awkwardly. But underwater, as Kuhl says, they're far from ungainly. They tuck their wings in like mini-torpedoes, their flipper feet propelling them after fish. Science is focused on their eating habits, so we still don't know whether they meet for life, for change partners year to year, how they choose where they nest, how they hunt, how they learn, think and feel. In many ways, cormorants are a mystery to us. I think cormorants are almost like an imaginary thing in the minds

of most people. It's something you read about, it's almost like a boogeyman and it's hard to empathize with the boogeyman. But when you start to understand or connect in a more nuanced way with an organism that is not human and especially something like a cormorant which is so different from us, you know, it's it's very hard I think for people to imagine themselves or humanity in this organism that is so different. They are profoundly alien. They're bald chicks. They're vast, noisy colonies. They're croaking voices.

There's this belief that people like anthropomorphizing organisms because it promotes empathy. So you know, we like chimpanzees because they look like us. We like baby tigers because they're cute. Those human values are very established in us and so therefore it's easy to empathize with those. With cormorants maybe it's a little bit more difficult because they're very different from us and they're very ancient, almost dinosaur-like. And they poop a lot. And they smell like rotting fish. And so it's difficult to imagine having empathy for something like that. Art takes a gap between what we know and what we don't and fills it with feeling, negatively

or for Cole, positively. I think art can push us beyond the cognitive. It certainly does connect us with the cognitive realm in that it may spark an interest in research or study or reading, but art also appeals to us on lots of other levels. For Cole, the appeal is also in making that art and encountering the reality of the cormorant. Do you love the cormorants. Do you love the cormorants? That's a really powerful question. I mean, yes, I do. I do, but I don't know if it's love in the way that we often think of it.

I think it's more, yeah, I mean, I'm a nature person. I always have been, and so I know it's love because I also feel an incredible amount of pain and sadness when I think about what is happening to them and to other species caught up in all of this awfulness. And so yeah, I think if you experience pain, then you experience love. I don't think I love cormorants in the way that I love people, but I do think I love them. I do love them.

Like cool swanson, behavioral ecologist Gail Fraser feels grateful to spend time with these birds. To know them, she thinks thinks is to appreciate them. I have the privilege of really seeing cormorants up close and getting to know them. I kayak out to a blind and watch a ground nesting colony. I watch them sit on the eggs and feed their little naked chicks and then watch the chicks grow up. So I feel like I have a view on cormorants that most people don't get. Most people just see the impact of entrees or see them flying in large flocks on waters.

And so I have tried to just teach people about cormorants, like the history of cormorants and why we should have more tolerance for them. They might not love cormorants necessarily, but they might start to accept them. They might start to think about these birds and all their thousands as having a place in the world.

If people knew about cormorants better, they might have more tolerance to it. And also, but it's also not just about Knowing about cormorants, but it's cormorants in the context of the human footprint on the land We have such a huge footprint on the land. Like why do we have? So little tolerance for another species that is nowhere near the equivalency of their footprint on the land that is nowhere near the equivalency of their footprint on the land. Writer Drew Lanham wants to give the Cormorants that space now, in all their numbers, not wait for their demise to feel sympathy or make a change.

If you think about how we react to a death in the street, and that then there's reaction. But there should be action before there are deaths in the street. So from a conservation standpoint, we react when it seems that species are about to go extinct, become extinct. But why don't we act before we reach that point? And so as we experience these billions of birds being lost, we have to think about keeping common birds common. Drew wants us not to forget about sparrows and crows and gulls and the geese just because we see them every day. But we also have to think about why birds like cormorants don't get that respect,

while they're not on anybody's list of species for conservation concern. Because the numbers would tell us that they shouldn't be, but the actions against them would tell us, hey, you know, these birds, maybe they're not being treated fairly. And why aren't they being treated that way? Cormorants are an excellent opportunity for us to do that. And part of that starts with, you know, we talk about name changes with acknowledging that these birds present opportunities for people to be racist. You know, who the birds are, who they are evolutionarily provides an

opportunity for us to to expose racism, to expose bias, but then also for us to talk about this with hunters, with conservation groups, to open a door that many people have probably been afraid to open, that will lead us down a different path of talking about conservation. Following that different path can mean opening ourselves to the symbolism, the emotions, the human drama behind our relationship to an animal like the cormorant. Drew sees lessons in the birds qualities. It's perfectly adapted to its environment to dive deeply if need be for fish, that they are extraordinarily powerful swimmers, that they are powerful flyers, that they have been resourceful

to make use of both saltwater, brackish and freshwater habitats. And that is important, that resourcefulness. How you make the best of a bad situation. Incorporates do that. And again, I'll go back to the human component. In the United States, black Americans have had to make the best out of bad situations constantly. And yet we survive and thrive in many instances in spite of that persecution against us. So in that way, the cormorant, I look at a cormorant and it becomes a heroic bird. It becomes a bird that's worthy for me of sort of totem status. You know, if I were to begin to stack one creature upon another and to call them my totems, I mean,

you know, cormorants would have to be there along with with ravens and crows and loggerhead shrikes and other blackbirds Gail sees that heroism, too cormorants are a story of persistence and recovery and I think it would be good if we could Look at that and think about the resiliency of nature and think about it as how it's a positive, how their recoveries and presence. We have the largest double-crested cormorant colony in North America nesting in the largest city in Canada. It's great those two things can

coexist and I would hope that we could have that happen elsewhere. I asked Drew what he thought it would mean to live in a world where that happened. Where we figured out how to live with cormorants well enough to let them just be. Oh my God. You know, Ruth, I've seen these, these wedges of cormorants, right? Just these strings, these skeins of birds often just flying right above the surf. You know, and you count a couple hundred birds, right? They just keep passing or just line skein after skein passes in front of you. And when I see that, I always imagine I'm like, you know, here we're thinking we're seeing lots of birds, but imagine when there were orders of magnitudes more. That to

me is what I call the good old days. Not any sort of old political ways that were exclusionary, but to see wildness in that way, to see that kind of abundance of wild birds, would be jaw-dropping. And so for again, for cormorants to have recovered past so much, but then to be discounted now so much, to see hundreds of thousands in a place, would be awe-inspiring, because it would tell me that something is going right. Yeah. Yeah.

For all of us. For all of us, indeed. You've been listening to an Ideas documentary called 13 Ways of Looking at a Cormorant. You can find more information on our website, cbc.ca.ideas. This episode was produced by Ruth Jones with Lisa Godfrey. Web producer for Ideas is Lisa Ayuso. Technical production, Danielle Duval and Nick Bonnen. Ideas Senior Producer is Nikola Lukcic. Executive Producer is Greg Kelly. And I'm Nala Ayed.