Family

I drove myself to the cliffs today, parked in our usual spot and walked about a half mile to see the cormorant nest I’d been hearing about. Although my foot gets stronger every day, it was a long half mile in my new brace with my own shoe instead of Mr S’s extra large sneaker. I think if I hadn’t wanted to see the birds so badly that I would have quit much earlier. But the point is: I made it to the overlook! And I stayed a good long time, trying to figure out how many babies were in the nest. Their sharp little beaks and sharp little wing bones look very similar, and when they’re at rest they look like boneless fuzzy stuffed animals, so it’s not easy to separate all those parts to do a tally. Ah, but the camera helps a lot. There are three babies (one is sitting up and the other two are fast asleep). The adults take turns minding the young, and both of them displayed bright blue chin feathers at different times, so I don’t know if they were male and female, parents, unrelated adults or distant relatives, but they were very careful and attentive to the babies, who I think are maybe a week old. When I first tuned in there was one caretaker, then a second mature bird arrived and the two talked for awhile until bird number one took off across the water and bird number two took over the babysitting. Lots of grooming and fussing and picking and arranging. Sometimes the babies sounded like someone stepped on a dog’s squeaky toy in the dark. This precarious site is very popular year after year. If you look carefully, there is another nest with more fuzzy babies toward the top of the frame, at an angle I can’t reach. 

In the Extra we got photo bombed by two seals.