Nature Notes
p. 81 · Read in the full issue
Conducted by Raimanu.
Cormorants In Fiji
/~\NE of the little rivers that discharge into Savusavu Bay on the southern coast of Vanua Levu, is the Nesekawa.
At high tide it is easy for a launch to enter and go some distance upstream, and people travelling across the island from Savusavu to Labasa often go so far by launch and then walk over the hills.
In June, 1952, I had occasion to do this, and was very interested to be told by the launch crew, as we approached the river mouth, that there was then to be seen about there a strange bird.
They said it resembled a muscovy duck, but had a longer neck and was just plain black and white.
It sounded like a cormorant, but I
knew that none were normally found in this Group. Imagine my surprise to find that the bird was indeed a cormorant, apparently the Little Pied Cormorant.
It was quite like a touch of Australia to see it sitting in characteristic pose on a dead tree.
The nearest normal range of this species is probably the Santa Cruz Group or New Caledonia, and this is quite a dis tance. Was it blown to Fiji, like the pelicans in the Solomons early in 1952?
It seems unlikely. The Coopers of Nasekawa plantation assured me that the bird had been first seen there in about July, 1951, Perhaps there is a chance that it travelled in some such way as the Pintail Duck recorded in PIM of July, 1952; but cormorants are not addicts to that kind of wandering, as a rule.
But there is a further question. Was
there ever a time when cormorants were common in Fiji?
There is an interesting reference in an old book which would make one think so.
Mrs. Gordon Gumming, in “At Home in Fiji,” puts into the mouth of Ratu Cakobau these words: “If matters remain as they are, Fiji will become like a piece of driftwood on the sea, to be picked up by the first passer-by. The Europeans who have come to Fiji are a bad lot.
They are mere stalkers on the beach . . . Of one thing I am assured, that if we do not cede Fiji, the white stalkers on the beach, the cormorants, will open their maws and swallow us.”
Just what bird was Cakobau referring to? I suppose the Fijian text of his words has not been preserved. If there were no cormorants then, as now, on the beach at Bau or Levuka, what bird did he mean?