I ventured out early in the morning looking for some sunbirds and weavers to photograph. As I passed the pond on the 17th hole of Montagu golf course I noticed nine White-breasted Cormorants sitting on the bank in front of the green. I captured a few images of the group and carried on my way. On my return I saw the cormorants were now swimming in the pond. I watched them for a while as they dived under water and weren’t seeming to catch much. By chance, I honed in on one particular cormorant, that had just started to dive under the water. I kept a look out for it to surface, and lo and behold, it had a large fish in its mouth which looked obviously much too large for it to swallow. It tried hard, and whilst doing this, I captured 182 images of its efforts in the space of 11 seconds. Most were amazing shots. The cormorant did eventually give up and just dropped the fish back in the water, albeit with some bleeding injuries. Most interesting was the way it unhinged its “jaw” to try to get the fish into its gular sac.
The following twelve images are a small selection of the whole sequence of 182 images. The first image was just as the cormorant re-surfaced with the fish ‘head first’ in its beak/mouth. This would suggest that it probably caught the fish from the front. The rest of the images depict its efforts to get it into its gular sac, although the fish seemed even too big for that. Birds like the cormorant use the gular sac to store their prey before either swallowing it or they regurgitate it later (like to feed their young). But this fish was too much of a challenge. Just after the last image in this sequence, the cormorant expelled the fish and it seemed to swim back under the water. I watched for a while longer but that seemed the end of the action. The fish has been identified as a Bull Gill Sunfish (Lepomis macrochirus). It is a member of the sunfish family and is native to a wide area of North America and was imported into southern Africa as a fodder fish for bass. It is renowned as an excellent table fish in the US but in South Africa its main purpose is bass food. They breed prolifically and are apparently easy to catch.
All images were captured with a Canon EOS R5 Mark II camera and a Canon RF 400mm f/2.8L IS USM lens with an attached Extender RF 1.4x. The camera rig was handheld. The exposure settings, set manually, were: ISO 1600. 1/2000sec @ f/5.6.
