Wednesday, February 10, 2010
Tomb of the Cormorants!
Warning: This post contains graphic, though not gory, images of dead birds.
During the adventure upon which we discovered the falcon with her kill, we also explored the remnants of the cormorant colony. For our readers who aren't aware, by 2008, Brandt's Cormorants were the most populous nesting bird on Alcatraz, with 1700 nesting pairs reported in 2007, and 1500 in 2008. Then last year, in 2009, they began washing up dead by the hundreds around the bay and by the end of the nesting season, not a single pair bred on the island.
While the lack of nesting was pretty disturbing to us bird nerds out there on the rock, the full on carnage we found in the colony area was surely a result of the successful nesting colonies of years prior. Life is brutal, and bird life is certainly no exception. So put on your favorite gothy-metal album (I recommend some Fields of the Nephilim) and ponder the very nature of your existence as we present the horrors that were found in the......TOMB OF THE CORMORANTS!
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1 comments:
It says a lot about how unrigorous the Ghost Hunter folks were that they didn't visit our cormorant colony.
If they'd gone down there with an open mind, I'm sure one of them would have fallen to the ground, clutching their throat, yelling "ARGHHHHH! I'm being killed by a f@#&%ing seagull!"
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