By the afternoon it was in 60’s and so pretty outside that I took the dog to the park after work. We walked around for about an hour. The WPA Rock Garden is starting to bloom up. I even got to see a Red Admiral Butterfly there. (It was looking pretty raggedy, though; too much sex.) At the middle pond in William Land Park, rain had filled it up so it was flooded up over the sidewalk in places. I saw quite a few turtles sunning themselves on the rocks, and among the regular contingency of ducks and geese, I also saw a little male Wood Duck and a pair of Double-Crested Cormorants.
The cormorants were already showing off their crests, extra feathers they get over the eyes during the breeding season. It makes them look like they have bushy eyebrows. While I was watching them, I saw one pull up sticks from the bottom of the pond and toss them in the air or drag them around for a while… I know that cormorants make their nests out of sticks, but I’d never seen this stick-toting and tossing behavior before, so when I got home I looked it up. Apparently, it’s something cormorants do. They also toss stones into the air and try to catch them. Funny! I didn’t know that! Oh, another fun fact: A group of cormorants is called a “flight”, a “gulp”, a “sunning”, or a “swim” of cormorants.
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