I haven’t seen “Porky’s Duck Hunt,” the animated movie that introduced Daffy Duck to the Looney Tunes family, which may be why I never really thought that Daffy was a duck. Daffy squawked more like a goose and looked goofy like, well, Goofy looked like a dog. It certainly didn’t prevent me from enjoying his evasive relationship with Elmer Fudd, but there was a linger suspicion that Daffy really wasn’t a duck.
Fast forward to the 1990s (truth be told there are many years between my first exposure to Daffy and the ’90s). While vacationing on Pelee Island in Canada, I gaze out on Lake Erie and saw what appeared to be a thin black goose. “What kind of goose is that?” I asked an islander. “It’s not a goods; it’s a cormorant,” he said scornfully. The islander groused about the bird — not a goose, not a duck, but its name, taken from the Latin, suggests a sea bird. The islanders hated it because it was an aggressive hunter, eating the fish in Lake Erie. According to Stan Tekiela, a naturalist and expert on birds, the cormorant is a large black water bird about 33 inches long with a long snakelike neck, two crests on its head, a long gray bill with yellow at the base and a hooked tip. The Wildlife Society says that cormorants as predators have been viewed negatively throughout history, representing greed and gluttony. Over the past 40 years there has been a major surge in the population of the double crested cormorant, one of six species of North American cormorants common in the Great Lakes region. The birds have been in competition with fisheries for years. They’re also known for destroying islands.
My cousin, Greg, brought this characteristic to my attention. He and friends from his high school days in Harrow, Ontario, used to spend the Labor Day Weekend on an island near Pelee in Lake Erie — until cormorants nested on the island, destroying the trees and foliage with feces. Their Labor Day tradition was ruined.
One day, we spotted a cormorant off Belle Isle in Detroit. Immediately, fear set in: was the cormorant looking for a nesting place and ultimately destroy Belle Isle as they have other islands? The following year, we saw a single cormorant again off Belle Isle, swimming below the surface, his head and neck sticking out of the water like a submarine periscope. We thought it strange that there weren’t any others, but grateful just the same. Looking at a close-up photo of a cormorant, it sure seemed like Daffy. No white ring around his neck, though. (Actually, I learned that Daffy didn’t have a white ring around his neck either, until his grandmother gave him a family necklace…)
I’m convinced more than ever that Elmer Fudd discovered the Daffy cormorant while he was hunting ducks. There are black ducks, but they have more bulk, short necks, and are not sassy.
Roasted cormorant?
I often thought that one strategy for containing the Asian carp was to have an open season on fishing and promote development of distribution channels to China where the fish is a delicacy. Why not do the same with the cormorant? While there’s no evidence that it’s a delicacy anywhere, marketing has been successful at selling many unsavory things. Why not roasted cormorant?
Actually, the Brits found the bird to be somewhat of a delicacy during World War II, although the country was rationing food and probably anything tasted good. I came across an interesting recipe for roasted cormorant from Canon Angus Macqueen. “When I was a boy, my brothers and I used to sail out the Monach islands in the autumn to net cormorants from the cliffs. The taste is quite extraordinary,” he wrote. His method? “First pluck the bird, then plunge the bird briefly into boiling water to blanch the skin. Stuff the bird with a large onion, then the bird is completely encased in a slurry of salt so that no part of it can be seen.” Cook the bird for five hours and you will have a delicacy of the British Isles.
Lake Ontario United offers a warning to go along with its recipes — cormorant breasts with lentils, Scottish cormorant pot stew, cormorant in cream sauce — like certain lake fish, don’t eat cormorant too often because it’s likely to have PCBs in its system.
Blog post by Dennis Archambault
Illustration by Warner Brothers
