Filming Cannibal Cormorants

Each morning, there were clues as to what fuels such an enormous gathering of animals. Half of the adults congregate on the edge of the colony, before taking off as one, flying across the sea and disappearing over the horizon. They glide through a near-constant haze: whisked-up dust from the surrounding deserts, which slowly sinks into the sea and fertilises it with nutrients that support a rich marine ecosystem. With bellyfuls of fish, the cormorants bring this bounty back to Rubud.

The island’s chicks are completely reliant on their parents’ care for food and shade. In theory, with their island home protected from mainland predators, they have everything they need to successfully raise a family. However, one failed fishing trip can spell disaster, forcing the other parent to temporarily abandon their chick to find food. Baked by the unrelenting sun, many chicks wander from the colony, screaming at anything to give them food. Hector, our cameraman, even had a chick wander into his hide. Convinced that his tripod handle was an adult cormorant, the chick begged the inanimate object incessantly for food (the first of many similar occasions when these desperate chicks would follow us around).

The realities of filming in a desert soon took their toll. Just as we were adjusting to the intense heat, stink and swarms of flies, little could have prepared us for the dust storms. The most innocent of breezes soon whipped up clouds so thick that visibility was reduced to just a matter of metres. With our filming team scattered around the island, we masked up and headed in the vague direction of the boat. Unfortunately, our captain had run aground in the storm and had radioed the coastguard to come to our rescue. I’ll never forget wading across the mudflats towards a distant flashing blue light, with some of the BBC’s most expensive equipment in my rucksack precariously dangling just inches above the water.

Such extreme weather events are rare, but spending months in one location gives you plenty of opportunity to witness the extraordinary. We stayed in a hotel on the mainland, and yet one memorable night, I was woken by a deckchair smashing against my door. Racing out of bed, I was horrified to discover that water was flooding across my floor and the windows were rattling in their frames. A once-in-a-decade storm had hit the area. Completely unforeseen and unseasonal – my immediate thoughts were with the cormorants.

The next morning, arriving at the island, we found our heavy-duty tripod legs about half a kilometre from where we left them. If the wind could fling several kilograms of metal across the desert, what chance did the cormorants stand? Whilst the team started to rebuild our flattened camp, with considerable trepidation I set about surveying the colony with our drone. Hundreds of dead chicks were strewn across Rubud. Nearly a quarter of the global population of Socotra cormorants nest on this island, and so, soberingly, this storm could have a significant impact on the species for years to come.

According to cormorant expert Dr Sabir Muzaffar, the area’s population has fallen by almost 50% in just the last 30 years. The Persian Gulf is littered with islands but, as construction booms in the region, they are constantly being developed, evicting cormorants from their historic breeding colonies. However, there is a sliver of hope: our field assistant, Hameed Ansari, told us that some abandoned land reclamation projects have inadvertently provided the cormorants with new breeding habitats.

After the dust had literally settled, we returned to the task at hand: filming cannibalistic cormorants. Cormorants opt for a strange parenting technique. They feed their chicks until they deem them fat enough, and then abandon them, forcing them to learn how to fly and feed independently. From the chicks’ perspective, this is far from appealing. The consequence is that hundreds of these stubborn starving chicks form enormous gangs, in an avian Lord of the Flies-type situation.

A few of these chicks realise there is food on the island – if they’re prepared to turn to cannibalism. For us, however, identifying these individuals took days of careful observation. Some would peck at anything that looked out of place, be it a pebble or a plastic bottle, and harass random adults that returned to the colony to feed their chicks. Others, however, had a certain look in their eye, and would march ominously from nest to nest in search of a meal. More often than not, a curious peck at an unprotected chick would prompt some movement, surprising the attacker and preventing any conflict escalation.

At last, after days of observation, we witnessed one particularly cunning bird grabbing an abandoned chick and swallowing it whole. Over in an instant, it’s one thing to see it, but quite another to film. Finally, after countless near-misses, our cameraman Ivo Nörenberg captured the shot. How do you react when you’ve just filmed the extraordinary yet heart-breaking behaviour of a chirping chick disappear down the gullet of its older counterpart? A triumphant “Yes!” followed by a contemplative silence was our answer.