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cormorant puke clump

a scavenging mission to collect bleached bones took me to Île Young, a cormorant rookery (shared with mainly black-crested night heron & gulls). as i got closer, i heard things thumping onto the ground & then saw them hurling outta the throats of the cormorants.

this was the first clump that i went to inspect. as i got outta the boat & closer to their trees, one bird after another kept hulping up clots of predigested marine life, making me suspect it was a distress response ("we have no means of defense: puke on it!"). this assumption was confirmed by Gail Fraser in Canopy Of Cormorants (a section of a (2o14?) film by Julian Victor), who asserts "...there may be fish falling from the sky..." due to invasion stress.

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Uploaded on July 21, 2022
Taken on July 14, 2022