Common Cormorant or Great Cormorant (Phalacrocorax carbo, Linn.), Volume 3, Plate 266

Female and young at left painted in Labrador in July 1833; the male was added later (possibly in March 1834).

Audubon reports that on July 3, 1833, at 3 a.m., he was crawling along a rocky precipice some hundred feet above the St. Lawrence River when he came across a pair of adults and two chicks in their nest, high up on a cliff. Where Audubon has to struggle to maintain his footing in this forbidding terrain, the birds are right at home. Obviously playing with the reader’s expectations (since the very existence of the plate suggests that this was only a temporary reprieve), he left the family undisturbed at the time. And indeed, a week later he did obtain a female and two young cormorants and proceeded to draw them. The scene rendered in the plate is strangely domestic-a mother huddled over her young children, while the father, slightly removed from the rest of his family, is watching over them all-and yet it is not: it is hard to think of a more inhospitable environment than the rocks of Labrador, where the gaping yellow beaks of the young cormorants provide the only note of color.

From John James Audubon’s Ornithological Biography

Look at the birds before you, and mark the affectionate glance of the mother, as she stands beside her beloved younglings! I wish you could have witnessed the actions of such groups as I did while in Labrador. Methinks I still see the high rolling billows of the St. Lawrence breaking in foaming masses against the huge cliffs, on the shelves of which the Cormorant places its nest. I lie flat on the edge of the precipice some hundred feet above the turbulent waters, and now crawling along with all care, I find myself only a few yards above the spot on which the parent bird and her young are fondling each other, quite unconscious of my being near. How delighted I am to witness their affectionate gratulations, hear their lisping notes, mark the tremulous motions of their expanded throats, and the curious vacillations of their heads and necks! The kind mother gently caresses each alternately with her bill; the little ones draw nearer to her, and, as if anxious to evince their gratitude, rub their heads against hers. How pleasing all this is to me! But at this moment the mother accidentally looks upward, her keen eye has met mine, she utters a croak, spreads her sable wings, and in terror launches into the air, leaving her brood at my mercy. Far and near, above and beneath me, the anxious parent passes and repasses; her flight is now unnatural, and she seems crippled, for she would fain perform those actions in the air, which other birds perform on the ground or on the water, in such distressing moments of anxiety for the fate of their beloved young. Her many neighbours, all as suspicious as herself, well understand the meaning of her mode of flight, and one after another take to wing, so that the air is in a manner blackened with them. Some fly far over the waters, others glide along the face of the bold rock, but none that have observed me realight, and how many of those there are I am pretty certain, as the greater number follow in the track of the one most concerned. Meanwhile the little ones, in their great alarm, have crawled into a recess, and there they are huddled together. I have witnessed their pleasures and their terrors, and now, crawling backwards, I leave them to resume their ordinary state of peaceful security.