Why is this British bird sometimes dubbed 'the black death'?
In the second instalment of our series on Britain’s most misunderstood birds, the voracious cormorant is in the spotlight.
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In some ways, there are two kinds of cormorants. There’s the real bird, the coastal fish-eating species that, at any range, looks black. See them well, however, and you appreciate how the adults have a beautiful oil-on-water iridescence, which shines variously green, blue, bronze brown and purple, depending on the light. Cormorants possess large webbed feet, thick sinuous necks, long hook-tipped beaks and short wings for a goose-sized bird. This all makes it appear heavy in flight, ungainly as it walks and awkward as it gets airborne.
Then there is the cormorant that dwells between our ears. This imagined version is also a dark beast, with a huge appetite for fish and an almost wilful disdain for fishermen, fishing clubs and for lakes or waterways that are expensively stocked with captive-bred fish. Milton anticipated this ill-will when he made the bird an image of Satan in Paradise Lost: ‘On the Tree of Life/… Sat like a cormorant; yet not true life/Thereby regained but sat devising death.’
Was Milton right? They certainly look distainful...
Unfortunately for fishing folk, cormorants have undergone a range change in the past few decades, with breeding numbers increasing to about 9,000 pairs. The wintering total is put at 65,000 birds, many on inland waterways. That switch by what is usually considered a coastal bird to freshwater places has been triggered by the spread in the UK of Continental cormorants. The subspecies, technically known as Phalacrocorax carbo sinensis, is better adapted to lakes and reservoirs and it is largely birds of this race that have triggered controversy.
Some of the claims against cormorants are rooted in fact. Numbers have grown across Europe and cormorants are supreme catchers of fish. If you see one swimming underwater, it’s astonishing how the bird loses its air-filled feathery bulk and becomes a lithe, almost snake-like organism that can twist and writhe after prey. The species has been recorded to take more than 90 different fish types, from tiny sand-eels to conger eels that are 2½ft long. This prowess is not appreciated by some human competitors, who speak of a ‘black plague’ or ‘black death’ ruining angling.
Cormorants have been illegally shot and poisoned, some with paracetamol crushed inside dead fish. Wilder claims are that each bird takes 6lb of fish daily — six times the average consumption and more than twice the bird’s own weight. Equally questionable is the notion that cormorants injure, but cannot swallow, large fish or that they eat large numbers of small fish and disproportionately deplete the population. What is not in doubt is the background ecology that brings about cormorant conflict.
Many seek Government licences to legally kill cormorants.
Anglers want to boost the numbers of their potential prey by introducing captive-reared fish. That artificial increase serves as a magnet for all kinds of fish-eating birds. Some of them, herons and goosanders, as well as cormorants, are inevitably unpopular and clubs seek Government licences to legally kill them. A previous limit to the cull of cormorants was set at 3,000 birds, but fishing clubs have sought to increase the number of legal licences issued for control. That goal received recent support from the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organisation, which recommended wider culls to reduce Europe’s total cormorant numbers. All of these moves butt up against protections both in UK law and EU legislation. So far, there is little hope of reconciliation.
One thing that might put the conflict in context is the long tradition of blaming other animals for declines in fish numbers. In Cornwall during the 1920s, thousands of shags were shot. Off the Northumberland coasts, it was young grey seals that were culled. In the 1970s, on a Carmarthenshire estuary, oyster-catchers were blamed for destroying the local shellfish industry. About 10,000 birds were duly shot, only for the cockle numbers to collapse shortly afterwards. Blaming birds for damaging fisheries in a world where four-fifths of all main catch species are judged to be harvested to or beyond sustainable limits is perhaps starting to sound like a classic case of the pot calling the kettle black.
This feature first appeared in Country Life's print edition on May 13, 2026. Click here for more information on how to subscribe.
