I have been away on "family duty" this week and enjoyed spending a couple of days with my granddaughter. Now I have a visitor in the shape of my 91 year old mother-in-law, so wanting to do the decent thing, I took her on a trip to Brixham.  At least here I might be able to see something interesting in the harbour, and I did!  There is nothing particularly exciting about a Herring Gull (above) except to say that they have a much more interesting face than you would at first imagine. For example, the red patch on the lower mandible.  Can you believe that  a scientist called Tinbergen won a Noble Prize for science by proving that Herring Gull chicks peck at this red spot to beg for food.  This pecking also stimulates the parent to regurgitate half digested food which is then fed to the begging chick. An interesting fact, but not something that would rival Fleming's discovery of penicillin or the discovery of dynamite. (Nobel discovered dynamite by the way), but an interesting fact associated with a much maligned bird. 

Now Cormorants are different. Also hated in some quarters, (by fresh water anglers for example), but in the right place and doing what they are supposed to do, I find them very interesting. There are always Cormorants in the harbour at Brixham, but are they in fact Cormorants?    No,they are the slightly less common and much more attractive,  smaller, Shag, the second of the UK's two Cormorant species. The light in Brixham harbour was perfect yesterday and I watched a couple of them hunting for food almost constantly. In the end I managed, with a bit of patience to get close enough for a good photograph.

here is a Cormorant taken, last year, for you to compare.  Notice the heavier head and different pattern of yellow on the face. Although it's easy to confuse the two species, if you see them side by side like this the differences are obvious.

To confuse the issue, it's not unusual  at certain times of the year, to see cormorants with white markings on the head and neck like this bird below. There is the chance of two different sub-species of Cormorant in the Uk both  "carbo", the northern bird  and "sinensis" from further south.  It is suggested, or has been suggested that these white headed birds are more likely to be the continental "sinensis" race but  this has also been largely discounted by some.  It seems to me that there is a lot of area left for detailed studies of Cormorants in the UK, as there appears to be still much confusion.