NEOTROPIC CORMORANTSPossibly the most common species at "Flamingo Lake" is the Neotropic Cormorant, PHALACROCORAX BRASILIANUS, what I grew up calling the Olivaceous Cormorant, shown below:
That picture shows one difference between Neotropic Cormorants and North America's other cormorant species -- the white V behind the beak, and the way the beak itself forms a sharp angle inside the V's arms, or, as Howell describes it in "A Guide to The Birds of Mexico and Northern Central America," "posterior edge of gular skin pointed." Other North American cormorants display a whole different rear-beak arrangement. In this area you need to keep these features in mind because occasionally Double-crested Cormorants do show up along the Yucatán coasts, though the Neotropic is always the species to be expected. Field guides mention the Neotropic Cormorant's green eyes, and it's true that in some lights you see greenness, but most of the time the eyes are exactly as in the picture, hardly visible at all. Often you see these birds perched on rocks and snags with their wings half open, drying and warming in the sun. In this same lagoon I've watched several Neotropic Cormorants hunting together. They formed a line with one end lagging the other, and proceeded across the lagoon, each bird's head completely submerged and the body nearly so, and noisily churning up a great deal of water with their passage. I think they were trying to scare up prey that with less rambunctious swimming would have stayed hidden. Typically you see this species working alone, however, making dives of a minute or so, then when they surface they show nothing but their snaky heads and necks sticking from the water. You can see a Neotropic Cormorant swimming his typical low-in-the-water, head-held-high manner below:
Neotropic Cormorants are distributed from the US's western Gulf Coast south to southern South America. |
