From You Tube: 'Filmed in the Penryn River, a pair of dividing birds, what are they?' For 'DIVIDING' presumably read 'DIVING', but the question still stands.
By the way, Tony S. once told me that Penryn was known as `Shagtown` because of all the cormorants that live there. Has anyone else heard this?
I've heard of people calling cormorants shags.
ReplyDelete"Shag" is the common name in the UK for the smaller and rarer of our 2 cormorant species, Phalacrocorax aristotelis (as opposed to the Common or Great Cormorant, in the UK generally just called the Cormorant, P. carbo). I think a few other, mostly smaller, cormorant species get called "shags" in other parts of the world as well.
ReplyDeleteAs for the birds in the video, i'm fairly certain that they are grebes of the genus Podiceps, but they look a bit small and short-necked for the common UK species, the Great Crested Grebe (P. cristatus) (though it's a bit hard to be sure with the blurriness of the video, but going by size comparisons with the (presumably Herring) gulls), but definitely too big for Little Grebe (Tachybaptus ruficollis), so i'm going to go with either Slavonian Grebe (P. auritus) or Black-necked Grebe (P. nigricollis)...