Socotra cormorant: its chicks look like a joke of neural networks (7 photos)

Do you remember that story about the ugly duckling who becomes a swan? So, her hero was supposed to be the Socotra cormorant! This bird hides the secret of transforming from a stubborn ball of fluff into an elegant black bird.





The adult cormorant is not unusual by the standards of other cormorants: a hooked beak, a long neck and webbed feet. In short, a standard cormorant. The bird is named after the island of Socotra, a popular resort among celebrities such as Sinbad, Alexander the Great and Marco Polo. It’s funny, but Socotra cormorants were discovered on Socotra only in 2005; there are much more of these birds on other shores of the Persian Gulf.



While you are dreaming of a vacation on the Red Sea, these scoundrels live there!

And if individually the Socotra cormorant is not very impressive, then a flock of these birds is truly a grandiose thing! Cormorants move in huge herds of tens and hundreds of thousands of beaks. As soon as such a crowd gets ashore, the beach instantly changes color to black. This is exactly what happened in 2018: hundreds of thousands of birds slightly alarmed local residents in Qatar, hiding a decent piece of the beach under their backs.





These residents of Qatar have not yet been to the resorts of the Krasnodar Territory.

But animals do not stay on the coast for long; they prefer to splash leisurely in the sea. A cloud of birds sways on the waves exactly until a school of small fish appears nearby. As soon as the prey is within reach, the cormorants activate the mass fishing mode. They drive the fish closer to the shore, where the prey cannot escape to the depths. Streamlined carcasses hide under water: cormorants actively work with both legs and wings, using their forelimbs as flippers. It can take up to three minutes to catch a bird's catch!



Compared to other cormorants, the Socotra cormorant can survive underwater for up to 3 minutes! This is a record among other cormorants!

Birds also approach childbirth en masse. From September to October, huge flocks break up into pairs and build nests. The living space for descendants is rather cramped - one or two nests per square meter. In meter-long birds, just a minute. True, such close proximity does not protect the young from predators. Every third egg will be stolen, every third chick will be bitten.



- How beautiful you are, girls, look, they’re running around in a crowd!

And this is not surprising: after all, young cormorants look like a carcass almost ready to eat. Quite a bit of white down covers the body, while the head, wings and legs are completely bare. You don't even need to pluck. But as soon as the feathers begin to appear, the bird is completely transformed, transforming into a dude and a connoisseur of black.



The first time I saw this photo, I thought that this image was generated by a neural network.

However, not everything is so rosy after coming of age. Active oil production and fishing put incredible pressure on cormorants. A major oil spill in 1991 killed tens of thousands of birds, and coastal development is depriving the animals of their homes. At the moment, cormorants have only 14 locations left where they can nest. In general, the population is still holding up, but the animal is in danger of extinction. Let's hope that the dexterity of cormorants will help them in the fight for survival!