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April 2016

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From:
Kenn Kaufman <[log in to unmask]>
Reply To:
Kenn Kaufman <[log in to unmask]>
Date:
Wed, 6 Apr 2016 22:49:33 -0400
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There has been some speculation about how the state-record Great Cormorant
got to Ohio. A couple of people wrote to ask me about this privately, and I
thought it would be worthwhile to post these thoughts to the listserve.

Todd Eiben's discovery of the adult Great Cormorant at Cleveland on March
4th was a fantastic find, and he deserves a lot of credit for picking it
out. But it wasn't completely unexpected; serious birders had been watching
for this species in the state.

It's true that Great Cormorant is essentially a coastal bird in North
America (although not in the Old World, where it occurs far inland). But it
also has a pattern of occurring far up river valleys, if only in small
numbers. In the northeastern states, Great Cormorants have been found 140
miles up the Hudson River in the Albany area, 170 miles up the Connecticut
River in Vermont, far up the Delaware River and the Susquehanna, and on
many lakes and reservoirs at varying distances from these rivers. Farther
north, Great Cormorants are common in the Gulf of St. Lawrence and they
have been found far inland along the St. Lawrence River -- around Quebec
City and Montreal, and a few times farther upriver, all the way to Lake
Ontario. Around the edge of Lake Ontario there are scattered records --
certainly it's a very rare bird there, but there have been a few dozen
records over the last few decades, on both the New York and Ontario
shorelines, all the way to the western end of the lake near Niagara Falls.

Given this pattern of occurrence, it was just a matter of time before a
wandering Great Cormorant found its way the short distance across to Lake
Erie (perhaps flying up the Niagara River). There's no need to invoke the
possibility of the bird riding a ship to get here. Indeed, it would seem
bizarre for a cormorant to stay on a ship throughout its passage up the St.
Lawrence River, across Lake Ontario, and then through the Welland Canal to
Lake Erie. It strains plausibility to imagine the cormorant jumping off to
hunt for fish along the way, then flying to catch up with its ship so it
could continue its free ride.

I know that Greg Miller produced a map showing strong winds pushing from
about New Jersey toward Lake Erie just a day or two before the cormorant
was found. It's not impossible that these winds brought the bird, but I
think it's very unlikely. The bird would have had to fly a very long
distance over land (including all the ridges of the Appalachians), ignoring
all the rivers and small lakes it passed, which wouldn't be normal for the
species in North America. I think it's most likely that this Great
Cormorant came by way of the St. Lawrence River and Lake Ontario, extending
a pattern of vagrancy that's already well established, and that it flew
here under its own power.

Kenn Kaufman
Oak Harbor, OH

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