I have two anecdotes that depict what I interpret as this same behaviour. The first was many years ago in Townsville where I watched from my hotel window a White-faced Heron chasing a cormorant (I forget which species) around the shallows of a pool. The cormorant would dive and the heron chase it as soon as it surfaced. I could not see any particular result of this behaviour. I assumed some opportunistic outcome such as grabbing the one that got away.
The second anecdote occurred a few months ago in Broulee where I saw a raft of shearwaters and some gulls hovering some hundreds of metres off shore. As I watched (with the usual problem of waiting for the swell to reveal the scene), I noticed something large appearing periodically. It turned out to be a seal and the birds went into a minor frenzy when the seal surfaced. So, it seemed that the birds were waiting for tid-bits or a “dropped” fish from the seal’s foraging.
On a different topic completely, my wife and I were gardening at our Broulee home last week (why do we do that??!!) when Adele exposed a large (about 50mm) weird insect from beneath the plant she was digging up. The insect immediately scampered until it encountered another plant and buried itself in 2 or 3 seconds. A bit of googling suggested that it was a mole cricket (Gryllotalpa brachyptera) which I had never seen before – one lives and learns. Is the animal considered a pest in the region, I wonder, given its root-chewing behaviour?
David Rosalky
From: John Layton [
Sent: Wednesday, 5 January 2011 4:18 PM
To: Canberra Birds
Subject: [canberrabirds] Litle Pied Cormorant & Egret
Re Geoffrey’s picture; cooperation between species fascinates me, whether it involves birds or mammals. Some pundits claim it even occurs among plant life(!?). Anyhow we can’t see what advantage the Little Pied Cormorant would get out of this; or did the LPL drive the fish into the grassy shallows for its own benefit and “Big Storky” muscled in?
John Layton.
Holt.
