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Half a century ago, Belgian Zoologist Bernard Heuvelmans first codified cryptozoology in his book On the Track of Unknown Animals.

The Centre for Fortean Zoology (CFZ) are still on the track, and have been since 1992. But as if chasing unknown animals wasn't enough, we are involved in education, conservation, and good old-fashioned natural history! We already have three journals, the largest cryptozoological publishing house in the world, CFZtv, and the largest cryptozoological conference in the English-speaking world, but in January 2009 someone suggested that we started a daily online magazine! The CFZ bloggo is a collaborative effort by a coalition of members, friends, and supporters of the CFZ, and covers all the subjects with which we deal, with a smattering of music, high strangeness and surreal humour to make up the mix.

It is edited by CFZ Director Jon Downes, and subbed by the lovely Lizzy Bitakara'mire (formerly Clancy), scourge of improper syntax. The daily newsblog is edited by Corinna Downes, head administratrix of the CFZ, and the indexing is done by Lee Canty and Kathy Imbriani. There is regular news from the CFZ Mystery Cat study group, and regular fortean bird news from 'The Watcher of the Skies'. Regular bloggers include Dr Karl Shuker, Dale Drinnon, Richard Muirhead and Richard Freeman.The CFZ bloggo is updated daily, and there's nothing quite like it anywhere else. Come and join us...

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Friday, November 27, 2009

SHAGTOWN DIVERS

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?

2 comments:

Retrieverman said...

I've heard of people calling cormorants shags.

stevethehydra said...

"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.

As 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)...