The Devil’s Cormorant: A Natural History

8 | Galápagos Islands

157 8 s Galápagos Islands ecuador Flightless cormorants on the Galápagos Islands decided, “fuck this, we’re going to swim.” kurt vonnegut, 1987 M ary Hepburn, a high school science teacher from upstate New York, is the character critical to saving the human race in Kurt Vonnegut’s novel Galápagos. In this story, published in 1985, Vonnegut places on the wall of a travel agency a large photograph of a flightless cormorant (Phalacrocorax harrisi) just so that Mary would be in the position to play this most pivotal of roles after she is shipwrecked on one of the islands of the Galápagos. All the seal-like, cormorant-like humans living one million years from now have her to thank for their being around at all. These future people, however, are not capable of this sort of gratitude, let alone of understanding the process of evolution that brought them to this point. Humans are far less complicated than they are today. Their brains have shrunk. They have beaks and flippers. Vonnegut, godlike, crafts a series of extraordinary events throughout Galápagos to get Mary Hepburn in the one location and position to save Homo sapiens. He has her do so on the hallowed ground where Charles Darwin began as a young man, with his own big brain, to percolate his theory of evolution by natural selection. Darwin’s experience with and study of cormorants are spare.He was never that excited about seabirds. The Angling Trust in England will be pleased to learn that Darwin did once write in his journal about shooting a great cormorant when he was seventeen.“The capacity of the stomach was very King - Devil's Cormorant.indb 157 7/1/2013 11:31:24 AM 158 the devil’s cormorant great,”Darwin wrote after the dissection.“There being four sole about half a foot long [15 cm] in it.”1 While aboard the hms Beagle several years later, Darwin shot and collected the blue-eyed shags of the Falkland Islands. Darwin wrote of the “extreme wildness of [the] shags,” and that he “saw a cormorant catch a fish & let it go 8 times successively like a cat does a mouse or otter a fish.”2 With Captain Robert FitzRoy, Darwin sailed up to the Galápagos Islands in mid-September of 1835. There is no record of his or anyone else’s aboard seeing a flightless cormorant during the six-week visit. These are the only cormorant species that live in this isolated archipelago. They nest today in only several small colonies on Isla Fernandina and Isla Isabela, which were known then as Narborough and Albermarle. Darwin must have barely missed seeing these birds, because the Beagle was becalmed and at anchor for a few days in the small channel between the two islands, right near where these cormorants are known to nest.Darwin went ashore on the northern part of Isabela, too, walking around on a day that was “overpoweringly hot.”He observed the marine iguanas, the“great black lizards ” that can swim and grow to four feet (1.2 m) long. He made notes on the geology of the island but said nothing about the bird life. After leaving the anchorage Darwin wrote on October 3, 1835: “We sailed round the northern end of Albermarle [Isabela] Island. Nearly the whole of this side is covered with recent streams of dark-coloured lavas, and is studded with craters. I should think it would be difficult to find in any other part of the world, an island situated within the tropics, and of such considerable size (namely 75 miles [120 km] long), so sterile and incapable of supporting life.”3 There were quite likely several colonies of flightless cormorants on this northern coast, almost as they are today. Maybe there were fewer than normal if, as evidence suggests, Darwin’s visit occurred during an El Niño year. In the decades around the historic exploration of the Beagle, the most active years of Pacific whaling in the era of sail, literally dozens of ships stopped at the Galápagos each year for water,food,and an anchorage.4 For example, a young Herman Melville was becalmed aboard a whaleship for over a day just north of Isabela in 1841.During about three weeks sailing in the vicinity of the island, he saw at least eight other whaling vessels.5 Later in 1854, in his fictional“The Encantadas,” Melville’s narrator describes Isabela and...