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Spectacled Cormorant

Uploaded by msnarayana on Oct 13, 2012

The Spectacled Cormorant or Pallas's Cormorant is an extinct marine bird of the cormorant family of seabirds that inhabited Bering Island and possibly other places in the Komandorski Islands and the nearby coast of Kamchatka. The Spectacled Cormorant a large, nearly flightless seabird lived on a few remote islands at the western end of the Aleutian chain. A presumed prehistoric record from Amchitka Island, Alaska (Siegel-Causey et al., 1991), is based on misidentification of Double-crested Cormorant remains (Olson, 2005). It is the largest species of cormorant known to have existed. The species was first identified by Georg Steller in 1741 on Vitus Bering's disastrous second Kamchatka expedition. Steller discovered the large, black birds while shipwrecked on a tiny island in the western Aleutians. He described the bird as large, clumsy and almost flightless though it was probably reluctant to fly rather than physically unable. In midwinter, the stranded sailors, Steller among them, began killing the slow-moving and unwary cormorants for food and wrote "they weighed 12 – 14 pounds, so that one single bird was sufficient for three starving men." Though cormorants are normally notoriously bad-tasting, Steller says that this bird tasted delicious, particularly when it was cooked in the way of the native Kamtchadals, who encased the whole bird in clay and buried it and baked it in a heated pit. Apart from the fact that it fed on fish, almost nothing else is known about this bird. The population declined quickly after further visitors to the area started collecting the birds for food and feathers, and their reports of profitable whaling grounds and large populations of Arctic foxes and other animals with valuable pelts led to a massive influx of whalers and fur traders into the region; the last birds were reported to have lived around 1850 on Ariy Rock islet, off the northwestern tip of Bering Island. The population of spectacled cormorants declined quickly as whalers, fur traders and Aleut Natives (brought to Bering Island by the Russian-American Company) killed the birds for food and feathers. By 1850, fewer than 100 years after Steller first saw these seabirds, the spectacled cormorant became extinct. Steller's records, six specimens, and two skeletons are the only evidence that this species existed fewer than 200 years ago. This island was later named Bering Island because Vitus Bering and many of his crew died there during the long winter after the shipwreck....

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Uploaded by:   msnarayana

Date:   10/13/2012

Category:   Creative Writing

Length:   2 pages (426 words)

Views:   1959

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