... with one eye open.

By Chamaeleo

The Flight of Cormorants

Splashes visible in large.

I went back to Mount Pond today: the Egyptian geese have returned to their various haunts (Eagle Pond and Long Pond) but for one cute individual. It is one with a very pale head, a short and vividly pink beak, and quite startling pink legs. Perhaps it was slow to move off, and realised that it rather liked the solitude...

It was pretty cold and although the sun stabbed its rays through the clouds from time to time, it was mostly rather dim and grey... The sun was mostly behind clouds when I took this photograph too, but the clouds were thinner so its colour was making it through.
There are lots of cormorants (Great cormorants: Phalacrocorax carbo) on Mount Pond at the moment: I find them very amusing. There were 8 there today (including a couple of paler juveniles). Their lives are quite routine: they swim and fish, they sometimes circle in the air, some perch in the trees on the mount, and they often rest on the water jet "islands" to dry their wings or just to rest (territorially). They are such comical things: shaggy and awkward... They remind me of the vultures in Disney's version of the Jungle Book. They often try to displace each other from the islands/floats on the pond: one will try to land on an already occupied float, only to be knocked off after a brief and rather half-hearted tussle, or they sometimes manage to knock the existing tenant off balance so that it slips into the water... Sometimes they tolerate each other on the islands. It was all slightly ill-tempered but not very aggressive. They also sometimes make quite amusing tenor chattering or croaking sounds.

I love curious collective nouns; several cormorants together are "A flight of cormorants", which doesn't seem very apt to me... They are also sometimes referred to as "A gulp of cormorants" which is better, and more apt I think. I still think that they ought to have a more interesting collective noun: any ideas?
Perhaps something silly like "a squabble of" or "a confusion of", or even "a contretemps of"...

Some favourites collective nouns are:
"A murder of crows"
"An exaltation of larks"
"A skulk of foxes"
"A covert of coots"
and of course "A file of civil servants"...

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