Cormorants

Caleb and I rode bikes around Hangzhou. We saw free cormorants fishing in West Lake. They would glide with wingtips just over the water for the longest stretch before landing. Many times in China cormorants are used by fisherman standing on narrow bamboo rafts. The fishermen tie a string round the cormorant’s neck so they don’t swallow the fish. We stopped our bicycle on the Broken Bridge. One cormorant dove three times and three times came up with a small minnow. Another cormorant dove and caught a considerably larger fish. The fish flopped back and forth and the cormorant opened its beak wider and wider until the fish swallowed down. (This isn’t my picture and the fish wasn’t this big. Well, now that I think about it, maybe the fish was a little bigger.)