He calls them devil birds. He says they’re greedy. He says they’re ruining the river. I say he sounds like a man who has bagged a donut after a day’s fishing.
The book is by a professor at King’s College London, Gordon McMullan, who argues that the cormorant has been badly treated by history and is a victim of “human moral sorting”.
To steel his arm, The Boss quotes Shakespeare and Milton, who were both quite unsporting about the bird. In Paradise Lost, Milton made Satan look like a cormorant, perched in the Tree of Life, plotting destruction while surrounded by beauty.
The Boss takes that as settled evidence. Four hundred years of literary disapproval, he says. I remind him that the same dead men also approved of the divine right of kings and syphilis cures involving mercury.
His grievance heightened last year when cormorants raided the trout streams of Victoria and Tasmania in alarming numbers, meaning The Boss had to work a little harder. He says one cormorant can eat half a kilo of fish a day.
He says this as though he has only just discovered that hungry creatures eat. One friend of his chased a mob off a lake and watched a cormorant cough up a fish mid-flight. The fish was 36 centimetres long.
That's not greed. It’s just a grander ambition than that of most fishermen I’ve watched from the bank. I, too, have been accused of eating more than my share: when Robert Browning wrote “A man’s reach should exceed his grasp” he was really thinking about dogs like me — and cormorants.
I point out that the pelican, which fishes like a man gobbling soup with his mouth open while wearing a bib, consumes two kilos of fish a day. The Boss looks confused: he considers the pelican a noble bird, while the cormorant consumes less — but is a menace.
The cormorant is a craftier hunter, so I have a sneaking admiration for it. It doesn’t bob about. It doesn’t circle and contemplate and make a show of it. It calculates — current, depth, the refraction of light on moving water — and then it’s gone. A black torpedo. It can stay down for 45 seconds, changing direction mid-pursuit, running a fish to ground in conditions where the pelican wouldn’t even get its feet wet.
And then it surfaces, climbs up on a log, and spreads its wings. The Boss says it looks like a flasher in a trench coat. I say it looks like a surgeon after a 12-hour shift — chest forward, arms wide, waiting for someone to remove the gloves.
Unlike other waterbirds, the cormorant lacks the oils that shed water naturally — a design compromise that keeps it lean and fast below the surface. So it stands there and lets the wind do the work.
McMullan's book — which the Boss has read with the selective attention of a man looking for confirmation — apparently makes the point that, pound for pound, cormorants don't eat more than any other fish-eating bird. They’re just better at it.
That is the real issue. Not morality. Not ecology. Not the poetry of avian symbolism. It is that the cormorant is very good at his river and The Boss is not. The trout take a year to breed up, and the cormorant arrives with the unapologetic efficiency of a true professional.
“I still don’t like shags much,” The Boss says.
I understand his frustration: I have watched him cast. Woof!
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