The cormorant: Ireland’s mysterious ‘black hag’ of the sea

An Cailleach Dhubh – The Cormorant

The cormorant
Went and wet his pants
One peg, two pegs
Hang him out to dry-o
Hang him out to dry

LIKE A DIME-STORE Dracula, the cormorant in daylight cuts a slightly comical figure, with its wings outstretched and facing into the breeze, drying off after another venture under the waves in search of food.

As the light starts to fade, however, and its guttural call – half goat, half seal – cuts across the estuary, its silhouette takes on a more sinister aura, and it now becomes easier to understand how this bird has fired the imagination of storytellers and sages through the ages.

In Irish, the cormorant has two names. The official one is an broigheall. The more colourful is an cailleach dhubh – the black hag. The latter directly links the bird to the Cailleach, a divine, witch-like figure in Irish mythology associated with death and the bleak winter landscape. Often depicted as a one-eyed crone, the Cailleach or Cailleach Bhéara is a storm bringer and a creator deity.

She rules the cold months from Samhain to Imbolc, acting as a shaper of mountains and valleys with her staff. A complex, solitary figure representing the cycle of life, death and rejuvenation, in Scottish folklore, she is said to have formed mountains by dropping boulders from her creel as she strode across the land and is sometimes portrayed as gathering wood on 1 February (Imbolc). The legend has it that if that day is sunny, she will stretch the chill of winter on throughout the spring.

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On the Irish coast, a cormorant landing on the steeple of a church was seen as a potent omen of doom or great tragedy, such as a shipwreck or the loss of lives at sea. This belief was tied to the bird’s ominous dark appearance, its cruciform silhouette when drying its wings and its association with greed and evil in literature such as Milton’s Paradise Lost or Shakespeare’s Richard II where the bird is described as an ‘insatiate cormorant’ that ‘preys upon itself’.

In Scandinavian and Norwegian maritime folklore, however, cormorants are traditionally believed to be the vessels or embodied spirits of sailors and loved ones who have lost their lives at sea. Rather than a bad omen, seeing a cormorant in this context is considered a positive or protective sign, representing the deceased returning to visit their families.

In China and Japan, the cormorant is a sign of luck – or at least of good bounty. The fishing skills of the cormorant were exploited there by tying a snare to the bird’s throat and casting it off to hunt. The snare prevented the bird from swallowing fish, and when the cormorant returned to the boat, the fisherman removed the fish and added it to their haul. Back home, the goddess Anú sent cormorants to find her husband after he failed to return from a fishing trip – perhaps he didn’t want to be found! One way or another, the birds successfully located him on the other side of Lough Neagh and upon finding him, the cormorants greeted him and their wings reportedly lit up the sky, which was interpreted as a gift from the heavens.

Cormorants are fairly widespread across Ireland and commonly found dotted around the coastline or near freshwater rivers and lakes. They feed mainly on wrasse and eels on the coast, and salmon smolts and sea trout where available. They are excellent divers, earning the nickname Billy Divers, and studies suggest that cormorants’ hearing has evolved for underwater use. Remarkably, their feathers aren’t waterproof, but water resistant; this makes them more efficient in their dive, but requires them to adopt their typical cruciform pose as they dry out their feathers in the prevailing winds.

The black bird

Their scientific name Phalacrocorax carbo, derives from the Greek words phalakros (‘bald’) and korax (‘raven’), while the word ‘carbo‘ is derived from the Latin for ‘charcoal’, referring to the bird’s black plumage. An alternative Irish name for the bird, fiach mara, or ‘sea raven’ mirrors this. Most anglers hate cormorants, especially in the autumn, when half of Ireland’s birds move inland to feed on freshwater coarse fish such as roach and perch, and the former, introduced by anglers as a live bait for pike, make up the majority of the cormorant’s diet.

The birds’ fishing prowess and voracious appetite had them persecuted close to extinction in the past. Until the Wildlife Act of 1976, Ireland had bounty payments for killing cormorants – more than 3,500 were shot in the final three years of the scheme. Under the 1979 EU Birds Directive, it became illegal to disturb, capture or kill cormorants, or to destroy or rob their nests.

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With their elongated body, reptilian neck and long, hooked bill, cormorants look almost prehistoric in appearance. They are easily confused with their cousin the shag; however, cormorants do not have crests, and they usually have a white patch on their thigh or neck, unlike the all-black shag.

They breed in cliff colonies around the coast of Ireland, with the largest numbers on the south and northwest coasts and some large concentrations also in County Dublin. Some birds also breed inland where they roost in trees.

The mythical Liver Bird, the symbol of Liverpool, is based on a cormorant and is often depicted holding a branch of laver seaweed. Local legend suggests the birds atop the Liver Building represent a male (looking over the city) and female (looking out to sea), and if they fly away, the city will cease to exist. Many years ago, a friend and I went to what was then the National History Centre in the city, as she claimed they had a stuffed Liver Bird in there.

After a lot of disbelieving brush-offs, one member of staff thought she had heard something of it and after a tour through the basement storerooms, a box was eventually uncovered. Inside was a taxidermist’s dream, or nightmare; a slightly scruffy stuffed cormorant with a few anatomical additions to better mimic the city’s emblem. I wonder where it is now.

As a matter of interest, the collective term for a group of cormorants is a gulp!

Roger O’Reilly is an award-winning artist and illustrator whose career has encompassed projects as diverse as storyboarding the Vikings TV series and illustrating for editorial and advertising clients around the world. His previous work Lighthouses of Ireland won the An Post Best Irish-Published Book of the Year in 2018. His new book, Birds of Ireland, Symbolism, Myth and Folklore is out now.