Heard Island shag
species of bird
The Heard Island shag (Leucocarbo nivalis), or Heard Island cormorant, is a marine cormorant native to the Australian territory comprising the Heard and McDonald Islands in the Southern Ocean, which is about 4,100 km south-west of Perth, Western Australia.
Taxonomy
The Heard Island shag is one of the blue-eyed shags, sometimes placed in the genus Leucocarbo, and a subspecies of the imperial shag. Others place it in the genus Phalacrocorax. It is now usually considered to be a full species.
Distribution and habitat
The Heard Island shag is restricted to the subantarctic Heard and McDonald Islands, and is known to breed only on Heard Island. Apart from breeding and roosting, its habitat is marine.
Description
The Heard Island shag has largely black upperparts and white underparts. The cheeks and ear-coverts are white; there are white bars on the wings, a black, recurved crest over the forehead, and pink feet. A breeding adult has a pair of orange caruncles above the base of the bill in front of the eyes as well as blue eye-rings. It is about 77 cm in length, with a wingspan of 120 cm and a weight of 3 kg.
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This entry incorporates text from “Heard Island shag” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.