by Nick Munday, Adelaide Urban Birding.

The subject of this article is one of the most commonly encountered waterbirds of your Adelaide Park Lands: the Little Pied Cormorant (Microcarbo melanoleucos).

A truly aquatic specialist, this sleek, elegant and compact bird is often seen for fleeting moments surfacing from the depths of local waterways before submerging again, or otherwise perched comically with wings outstretched.

The Little Pied Cormorant is one of Australia’s five native cormorants and is perhaps the most adaptable and commonly encountered in urban environments. This species is equally at home in coastal marine, saltwater estuaries, freshwater rivers and lakes, and artificial urban wetlands, including (and especially) those dotted throughout the Park Lands.

Cormorants belong to the order Suliformes, a particularly diverse group of aquatic birds that also includes frigatebirds, boobies, gannets, and darters. Of these, the cormorants are the most species rich, comprising the family Phalacrocoracidae.

All cormorants are characterised by possessing long flexible necks, hooked bills, strong webbed feet, and exceptional diving ability and underwater agility. Some species also have a tuft of feathers just above the bill (with these species being referred to colloquially as ‘shags’), although none of the species found in Australia display this characteristic.

The Little Pied Cormorant, as its name suggests, is the smallest of the cormorants commonly found in Australia (although, not by much) and is readily identified by its short stature and monochromatic plumage: black back and wings, and white underparts and face, with a striking yellow bill. When not diving, a cormorant can be easily identified by its typical resting posture: wings outstretched as though it were measuring the size of its last fish!

Little Pied Cormorants drying off between fishing voyages, with one adopting the typical cormorant pose of outstretched wings. Photographed here in a coastal environment on rocks just off Port Elliot, Fleurieu Peninsula. Photograph: Adelaide Urban Birding.

Like other cormorants, the Little Pied Cormorant feeds almost exclusively on aquatic animals, although being comparatively small, it has a varied diet and will hunt for all manner of fish, tadpoles, crustaceans, and other invertebrates.

As diving specialists, Cormorants have evolved a relatively low buoyancy compared to other waterbirds, which allows them to remain submerged with minimal effort. To this end, cormorants lack the waterproofing of their feathers typical of other waterbirds like ducks, and completely saturate their bodies when underwater to reduce unnecessary buoyancy. However, this comes at the cost of reduced flight performance, and as such, you’ll often see them drying their wings for extended periods after diving.

A clumsy affair: while graceful swimmers, Cormorants are not particularly elegant on land. Photograph: Adelaide Urban Birding.

The Little Pied Cormorant is widespread across Australia, including all but the driest parts of the continent.

Within your Adelaide Park Lands, the Little Pied Cormorant shares its environment with three other cormorant species, the Australian Pied Cormorant (Phalacrocorax varius), the Great Cormorant (Phalacrocorax carbo), and the Little Black Cormorant (Phalacrocorax sulcirostris).

The Great Cormorant is a truly enormous, mostly black bird, and more likely to be mistaken for an Australasian Darter (Anhinga novaehollandiae) than any of the other cormorants.

The Pied Cormorant and the Little Black Cormorant share more similarities with the Little Pied Cormorant, but can be readily distinguished: the Pied Cormorant is much larger than the Little Pied Cormorant, has a longer neck and beak (which is pale grey in colour), and more closely associated with estuarine and marine environments than inland waterways (but can be seen occasionally in suburbia). Meanwhile, the Little Black Cormorant, while a similar size to the Little Pied Cormorant, is completely black in colour with a bold greenish-blue eye.

An immature Pied Cormorant, which may be mistaken for the Little Pied Cormorant, but is notably larger and has a much longer beak. Photograph: Adelaide Urban Birding.

All of these cormorant species can be seen where there is sufficient water for foraging, and all may be encountered along the length of the Torrens Lake and will occasionally roost together.

In the Adelaide Park Lands, you are likely to see Little Pied Cormorants along any of the parks that border the River Torrens, in the Adelaide Botanic Garden (Park 11), the wetlands of Victoria Park / Pakapakanthi (Park 16). There is even one bird that can be seen regularly within the Veale Gardens of Veale Park / Walyu Yarta (Park 21), apparently unfazed by the relative shallowness of the water!

*A Little Pied Cormorant at the fountain in Veale Gardens. I remain unconvinced this is the best fishing spot in town but this bird is apparently unfazed. Photograph:* ***Adelaide Urban Birding***.

There is an iNaturalist page where citizen scientists (like you) have recorded sightings of Little Pied Cormorants Boobooks in your Adelaide Park Lands and elsewhere: https://inaturalist.ala.org.au/taxa/370351-Microcarbo-melanoleucos

To find out about other birds in your Adelaide Park Lands, check out our What Bird is That? series.

Top photo: Little Pied Cormorant along the banks of the River Torrens by Adelaide Urban Birding.

Nicholas Munday is an environment and planning lawyer with degrees in law and science (evolutionary biology and ecology) from the University of Adelaide.

He has a strong interest in biodiversity conservation and runs the ‘Adelaide Urban Birding’ Instagram account (@adelaideurbanbirding), dedicated to his photography of native birds in the Adelaide metropolitan area.

In his free time, Nicholas is well-known in the Adelaide choral music and theatre communities and also enjoys bushwalking, writing, and, of course, photography.

The opinions expressed in this article are entirely those of the author. This author is not affiliated with the Adelaide Park Lands Association Inc.