OUR SATANIC SHAG

Forest and Bird, Issue 47, 1 February 1938, Page 3

OUR SATANIC SHAG

By “A Keen Angler.”

HIS AMERICAN COUSIN’S ECONOMIC EMINENCE

Thence up he flew, and on the tree of life, The middle tree and highest there that grew, Sat like a cormorant.

IN quoting these lines from “Paradise Lost” one need not follow the immortal John Milton’s symbolism, or ponder too deeply the suggestion that the cormorant on the tree of life was Satan. It is sufficient to know that Milton knew cormorants, called in New Zealand shags. He knew their choice of the highest trees to nest in, and of high points to rest on. He knew his cormorants far better than he knew his Satan.

A shag on the topmost point of a dead riverside tree appears to be an aloof creature. Such aloofness may have been useful to the bird in the days of bows and arrows, but is little protection for it against modern small arms of long range and great accuracy. Back in the mountain gorges of various New Zealand streams are tree-top colonies of shags’ nests, and thither go the murder gangs of sportsmen armed with their little deadly rifles. Sitting birds are shot through the nest, till the mother head bows and the long neck collapses down the side of the rude structure which serves as home and nursery. The birds who thus die at their post generally stop there, and give the slayer no token whereby he may collect blood-money from the Acclimatisation Society. But other shot birds crash down from great heights, so that the cash transaction can be completed. The cormorant at any rate some species of —is not really an aloof bird. It is aloof only when huntedsometimes not even then. It is easily tamed, and trained to catch fish for its keeper. In England the master of the cormorants was one of the officers of the Royal Household. The Chinese still use cormorants to catch fish in shallow rivers. A strap is fastened round the bird’s neck and so, without impeding its breath, hinders it from swallowing its capture. “The activity the bird displays under water is almost incredible.” That is its only Satanic feature.

THE NOV/ PROTECTED GUANAY.

This almost obsolete industrial use of the cormorant is not its only industrial use. Ex-

cept in a few countries, the cormorant no longer supplies fish for the breakfast table, but it still feeds the pastures and crops of the fields. In the face of all competition from modern competing manures guano remains a colossal industry, and the cormorant of the Peruvian coast — a relative of the New Zealand spotted shag is claimed to be the greatest revenue-producing bird in the world.

Surely it is no small thing to say that the bird to which, in a cash sense, the industry of the world owes most, is one of these despised shags or cormorants. Yet Robert Cushman Murphy, in the “National Geographic Magazine,” sets out to prove that the Peruvian cormorant or guanay is “figuring in dollars and cents, and with reference to effect upon human life and geography . . . king among avian benefactors.”

The guanay is a cormorant species related to our sub-Antarctic shags— is, to New Zealand shags—but the existence of a cool current (the Humboldt current) off the Peruvian coast has enabled this representative of an Antarctic group to live within six degrees of the Equator. Its life has become localised to the Humboldt current and to the strip of South American coast the current washes. The guanays are present literally in millions because the current also contains millions of myriads of small fishes. From the crop and gullet of a dead guanay the remains of no less than 76 anchovies, four or five inches in length, have been taken. If millions of guanay can be carrying each 50 to 100 small fish at a given time, with no exhaustion of fish supply, how many fishes must there be? The fish move in immense shoals, with almost equally immense “rafts” of guanays over them, and with preying fish underneath. If a shag is to be shot in New Zealand because its crop contains two trout, what slaughter should be inflicted on these guanay fish-mur-derers in South America?

As a matter of fact, the South Americans allowed the guanays to be made war upon

until their numbers, and the guano returns, fell. Then the South Americans returned to the good old Inca tradition of guanay protection. We can all learn from the aborigines. Because fish teem in the Humboldt current, because guanays are proportionate in number, because the arid breeding islands are small in proportion to the millions of birds and compel them to nest close together—for these reasons guano accumulates on the islands in such quantity as to provide a huge fertiliser industry, which makes the guanay the greatest revenueproducing bird in the world.

KILLING NO MURDER.

According to Acclimatisation Society logic, the guanays should be put to the sword. Their fish- consumption makes New Zealand shags look like novices. New Zealand logic always regards killing as murder, but in Nature killing is often no murder at all. For instance, probably there are

more birds and more fish off this South American coast than anywhere else in the world, except perhaps in parts of the Antarctic. Where nature has created a balance between the preying creatures and the creatures preyed on, the predator is no murderer. The gunman who kills him is.

Here, then, is a contrast that excites thought: The Acclimatisation Societies and the Department of Internal Affairs in New Zealand destroy shags to protect fish, but the Peruvian authorities strictly protect the shag, with the result that both fish and shags abound as they do in few other areas. It is a cardinal fact that a plentitude of wild life almost solely depends upon a bounteous food supply. The natural enemy is a most important factor in that it helps in the preservation of the species preyed upon by eliminating the easily caught weak members —the ill-fed, the diseased, the deformed. Thus the natural enemy has its indispensable mission and its place in Nature’s scheme.

EVOLUTION.

In nature all forms of life are ever changing. This process has gone on for ages upon ages ever since life came into being on this planet. Plant life sprang originally from minute forms. Ages upon ages produced the present form of trees and this changing process in form is even now taking place. What a great forward step it was when, say, such a plant as a tree fern produced a branch or branches. One such tree fern exists near Shannon which is protected by law. For years past this specimen was unique in New Zealand as showing the evolution of a tree fern into the branching form of more advanced types of trees. Two more such trees have now, however, been located by a junior member of the Forest and Bird Protection Society, Master John Mitchell, of Shannon. The photos below illustrate the appearance of these new finds.