Look at the color of that mouth! Double-crested cormorants usually don’t make the list of my gotta-have bird captures, but sure glad I paid attention to this one. It had been sitting in the west end of the lake, and like the excellent diver and fisher that it is, it made a catch and promptly took off flying. It had a precarious grip on the fish, and a few seconds after this capture the fish lived to see another day as it plopped back into the lake.
I’ve always thought their turquoise-colored eyes were striking, but I had no idea the entire insides of their mouth were a beautiful blue until I was able to pixel-peep this image during processing. Just beautiful. Although now common to this area, back in 1974 there were only 12 cormorant nests in Illinois, and were on the endangered species list. As with many other species that were threatened by pesticides, cormorants have recovered after the banning of these polluting chemicals. Welcome back you pretty blue-mouth birds!
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