A vocabulary of landscape — a landscape of words
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cormorant
The cormorant is a long-bodied fish-eating bird that swims underwater with its feet, hooking prey with a bill that ends in a downturned point. Its feathers wet out rather than shedding water, which kills its buoyancy and makes it a far better diver, and it then has to stand with its wings held open to dry. It sits low in the water with the body nearly submerged, and it takes off with a long running start.
Etymology
The name means sea-raven. It came into English from Old French, and the French built it out of two Latin words, corvus for raven and marinus for of the sea. The bird is not a corvid and is not related to a raven, but it is big, black, and hoarse, which was enough. Several languages made the same call independently.
Notes
Cormorant fishing was practiced in Japan and China for over a thousand years, with a snare set at the base of the bird’s throat so it could swallow small fish but not large ones. It still runs on the Nagara River in Gifu as a licensed and largely ceremonial fishery.