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Cormorants

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Cormorants 

(Phalacrocoracidae), afamily of birds of the order Pelecaniformes.

Cormorants are excellent divers and underwater swimmers. The plumage of most cormorants is black. The length of the body ranges from 55 cm (pygmy cormorant) to 92 cm (European cormorant). The family includes two genera: Nannopterum (one flightless species), found on the Galapagos Islands, and true cormorants, or Phalacrocorax, found in Europe, North America, Asia, Africa, Australia, and New Zealand. In the USSR there are six species: European, green, pelagic, red-faced, Temminck’s, and pygmy cormorants. Until the middle of the 19th century, Pallas’ cormorant, a flightless bird, lived on Bering Island. Cormorants nest in colonies on rocks or in trees. They feed on fish; this sometimes harms the fishing industry.

REFERENCE

Ptitsy Sovetskogo Soiuza, vol. 1. Edited by G. P. Dement’ev and N. A. Gladkov. Moscow, 1951.


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Put out of countenance by the manner in which he thus "set foot" upon the New World, he uttered a loud cry, which so frightened the innumerable cormorants and pelicans that are always perched upon these movable quays, that they flew noisily away.
There are those who, like cormorants and ostriches, can digest all sorts of this, even after the fullest dinner of meats and vegetables, for they suffer nothing to be wasted.
Whether whales feed on them I do not know; but terns, cormorants, and immense herds of great unwieldy seals derive, on some parts of the coast, their chief sustenance from these swimming crabs.
 
 
 
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