Abstract
IT is sometimes said that since the neolithic age man has made no progress in domesticating wild creatures, except for the improvements made in the breeds of animals domesticated at that time. But the domestication of the cormorant in China belongs to a much more recent period. The story has been worked out in detail by Berthold Laufer of the Field Museum of Natural History, Chicago (Field Museum Publication 300, Anthropological Series, vol. 18, 1931). The earliest mention of the use of trained cormorants for fishing refers to Japan and dates from about A.D. 607, when, presumably, such use was unknown in China. Yet the trained cormorants of Japan are scarcely more domesticated than the English cormorants which James I. delighted to watch, and for whom he appointed a ‘master of the royal cormorants’. In China the birds are completely domesticated, being bred and reared in captivity, so that they become perfectly submissive to their masters, whose commands they understand, and whom they obey with the readiness and docility of a dog. Characteristic of their domestication is the appearance amongst them of colour varieties, particularly of albinistic and pied individuals. Their eggs are always hatched by domestic fowls and not by the cormorant mother, and the young are fed on special foods until the speriod of their training for fishing begins, and this lasts for seven or eight months.
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Cormorant Fishing in China. Nature 129, 231 (1932). https://doi.org/10.1038/129231a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/129231a0