After being plucked from a huge utility towers in the South San Francisco Bay, double-crested cormorant chicks are being reared and eggs incubated at IBRRC’s bird center in Northern California.
This is the second time we have raised and rehabilitated baby cormorants from eggs. Last year, we raised a small batch of cormorants and had about a 60 percent release rate of wild, healthy juvenile cormorants.
One of our longtime volunteers, Jean, shot this video. Here’s her description:
In the beginning of the video, you can see our large egg incubator. Next you see the youngest chicks, several days old, being fed in an incubator in our ICU unit. They are born naked and blind, but now their eyes are beginning to open. To avoid habituation with humans, we put on a black cape before we feed the chicks. As the one behind the camera, I am also wearing a cape.
The next video clips show increasingly older chicks. The oldest ones in this video were taken from an outdoor cage in a special section of our Pelican Aviary to one of the inside cages, where they will spend the night.
