This visit was the first time I noticed cormorants at the refuge. I'm sure they've been around on other visits, but they're not exactly flashy-looking birds so it's not surprising that I didn't pay them attention. Cormorants look like someone crossed a goose with a duck and a heron. They look a bit out of place sitting up in a tree, and yet that's where they were.
I'm half-convinced that we saw juvenile Neotropic cormorants but I'm not 100% certain. It's possible that they were juvenile double-crested cormorants. Looking at pictures of both, they are very similar. Most of the differences are marked in comparison to each other and it's hard for me to tell if the ones we saw had shorter or longer beaks (or lighter or darker breast feathers) than the variety we didn't see.
Later on, I saw this cormorant in a dead tree with a red-winged blackbird. It's an odd combination but I love the contrast – especially when the two birds appear to be mimicking each other's body language.
Eventually the blackbird got annoyed with me watching them and it flew off. The cormorant didn't gaf though.
These juvenile cormorants weren't particularly pretty or interesting to watch, but what they lacked in excitement they more than made up for in a chill-ness that allowed me to take some decent pictures of them. I'm not very good at catching good photos of birds when they're flitting about. I'm less "agitated blackbird" and more "slo-mo heron hunting" speed.
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