Insight: staging cormorants

A tiny fraction of the clouds of cormorants crowding upper Sandusky  Bay today.

November 1:  The remains of Hurricane Sandy pushed inland just a couple of days ago.  Kimberly and I were driving back to Ohio from New England during the height of the storm, but today I got out to check some local spots along the Lake Erie shoreline in n.w. Ohio, to see if the storm had brought in any out-of-place birds. 

One of the most notable things that I saw involved a common bird, however, not a rarity.  Out on the open Lake Erie shoreline, where the northwest wind was whipping the waves into a frenzy, I saw very few Double-crested Cormorants.  But on the more protected waters of Sandusky Bay, huge flocks were floating on the water, crowding onto exposed islands, flying back and forth constantly.  From one vantage point on the north side of the bay, the old Yetter Road fishing access, I made a conservative estimate of eight thousand cormorants.  

The majority of the cormorants that nest around the Great Lakes move farther south for the winter, and these flocks most likely were staging prior to their southward migration.  Their concentrated numbers on the bay, rather than on the open waters of Lake Erie, may have been partly a consequence of the very strong winds and high waves of the last couple of days.  The western basin of Lake Erie is quite shallow, so strong waves will stir up the silty bottom of the lake, making the water quite muddy and opaque; this would present a challenge for birds that pursue small fish underwater, such as cormorants.  

Whether or not this was a factor, today's huge numbers on a small area of the bay certainly made for a spectacle.