What a weather! Fresh air, warm sun, little wind. The spring bulbs shoot out of the ground, the great tits chatter away, the geese mate, the magpies nest, the woodpeckers drum, the cormorants turn white. Well, their faces and hip patches anyway.
They’re always early, those eels. (Seasoned birders often abbreviate their loved ones. Godwits become grits, mayors burries, herring gulls silvers, leaf wrens blakos, swifts vultures, oystercatchers schollies, and cormorants eels or alies.)
It is not surprising that cormorants (geese, magpies) are already courting, mating and nesting. They don’t do it earlier than usual; alies sometimes start as early as December. It’s smart to start early – the early bird catches the worm and can use the whole spring and summer for the rearing of the offspring. In the autumn it must be large, thick and capable enough to dig it up yourself. In spring and summer there is more to eat. In addition: those who start early are also ahead of the competition from the thousands of birds that only arrive from Africa in April or even May.
People are also rummaging in the garden again
We humans are no different. On these sunny days I see them rummaging in the garden, hanging bedding in open windows – signs of a new season. I don’t know if people are also more inclined to erotic acts in the spring. I’ll look it up. No, the busiest month in terms of births is September, which means that the Dutch are most active in December with courtship and mating. That can also be explained. In retrospect, a lot of behavior seems easy to explain. Prediction is another matter.
Cormorants breed in colonies near the water, preferably in trees. They catch all kinds of fish; they catch the most numerous fish the most, pos for example, and that is fish that is not commercially interesting to humans. Fish fished by humans are rarely plentiful. After a dive on fish, they dry their spread wings while sitting.
Three times a week, biologist Koos Dijksterhuis writes about something that grows or blooms. Read his previous Nature Diaries here.