Do cormorants eat ducklings

Answer 1

Cormorants eat fish. They catch them while swimming underwater.

Answer 2

They do indeed eat the chicks of other birds as I have seen first hand a small to medium sized Pied Shag/Cormorant pursue and catch a Hard Head/White eyed duckling while its mum tried vainly to ward the Shag off. The Shag simply submerges, and once under the chick, pulls it down and swims off, surfacing a safe distance from the mother to devour the unfortunate little thing.

In one of my local parks (Queen's Gardens Perth WA) there is small lake system and the breeding birds include, Pacific Black ducks, Hard Head / White eyed Ducks, Wood ducks, lesser Swamp hens, Coots, Dab Chicks and a pair of Black Swans.

From several years of observation I have concluded that not one Hard Head ducklings lives longer than 10 days, 98 percent of Pacific Black ducklings suffer the same fate. Wood Duck ducklings do better (approx 30 percent survive) as they spend most of their time on land.

Less than 10 percent of Swamp Hen and Coot chicks make it to adult hood. The dab chick couple have had two chicks in total (that I've seen) one this spring and one two springs back, in approx 5 years. Both babies were close to maturity when I last saw them so I assume they survived and flew off to another water system. Whether or not they had siblings I can't say as I've never discovered their nests.

The Black Swan cygnets as as you would expect, have an excellent survival percentage. I can only recall 4 cygnets vanishing from more that 20 hatchlings over approx 6 years.

I know that Crows, Sea gulls, Herons, Falcons, maybe Pelicans, Cats and probaly even Rats will predate on ducklings but I am now convinced that the high mortality rate in Queens Gardens is mostly due to Cormorants. The fact that Wood Duck ducklings spend less time on the water than the other chick types and have the highest survival rate support this theory. I don't yet know if all of the 3 or so types of Shags in the Park have the same feeding behaviour but I believe they do as when hatchlings are about I haven't yet seen any Shags diving for fish. They spend most of their day sunbathing probably as a result of them being well sustained by a couple of hatchlings per day.

FYI.

Answer 3

You can in fact eat cormorants. They are good for pate and in casseroles and have been known to taste like fish.

Answer 4

There are NO preys of the Cormorant, are there?

Answer 5

yes they do