Florida Cormorant (Carbo Floridanus), Volume 3, Plate 252
Painted on April 26, 1832, Audubon’s 47th birthday.
The plate derives its effectiveness from the contrast between the finely detailed adult male individual in the foreground and the flocks of indistinct cormorants huddled on the water in the background. Audubon mistakenly thought that what he called the “Florida Cormorant” and the Double-crested Cormorant (plate 257) were two different species. Today, his Florida Cormorant is regarded as a subspecies. Audubon’s corresponding essay contains a remarkable scene in which he wades into the water and finds himself suddenly in the middle of a considerable number of mating cormorants, a scene of considerable comic potential that Audubon, a strange-looking “goblin” in the avian world, clearly appreciates.
From John James Audubon’s Ornithological Biography
On the morning, beautiful but extremely hot, of the 8th of that month, while rambling over one of the Keys, I arrived at the entrance of a narrow and rather deep channel, almost covered over by the boughs of the mangroves and some tall canes, the only tall canes I had hitherto observed among those islands. I paused, looked at the water, and observing it to be full of fish, felt confident that no shark was at hand. Cocking both locks of my gun, I quietly waded in. Curious sounds now reached my ears, and as the fishes did not appear to mind me much, I proceeded onward among them for perhaps a hundred yards, when I observed that they had all disappeared. The sounds were loud and constantly renewed, as if they came from a joyous multitude. The inlet suddenly became quite narrow, and the water reached to my arm-pits. At length I placed myself behind some mangrove trunks, whence I could see a great number of Cormorants not more than fifteen or twenty yards from me. None of them, it seemed, had seen or heard me; they were engaged in going through their nuptial ceremonies. The males while swimming gracefully around the females, would raise their wings and tail, draw their head over their back, swell out their neck for an instant, and with a quick forward thrust of the head utter a rough guttural note, not unlike the cry of a pig. The female at this moment would crouch as it were on the water, sinking into it, when her mate would sink over her until nothing more than his head was to be seen, and soon afterwards both sprung up and swam joyously round each other, croaking all the while. Twenty or more pairs at a time were thus engaged. Indeed, the water was covered with Cormorants, and, had I chosen, I might have shot several of them. I now advanced slowly towards them, when they stared at me as you might stare at a goblin, and began to splash the water with their wings, many diving. On my proceeding they all dispersed, either plunging beneath or flying off, and making rapidly towards the mouth of the inlet.