Little black cormorant
species of bird
The little black cormorant (Phalacrocorax sulcirostris) is a member of the cormorant family of seabirds. It is common in smaller rivers and lakes throughout most areas of Australia and northern New Zealand, where it is known as the little black shag. It is around sixty centimetres long, and is all black with blue-green eyes.
Taxonomy
The little black cormorant was formally described in 1837 by the German born naturalist Johann Friedrich von Brandt. He placed it in the genus Carbo and coined the binomial name Carbo sulcirostris. The species is now placed in the genus Phalacrocorax that was introduced by the French zoologist Mathurin Jacques Brisson in 1760. The genus name Phalacrocorax is the Latin word for a cormorant. The specific epithet sulcirostris combines the Latin sulcus meaning "furrow" with -rostris meaning "-billed". The species is monotypic: no subspecies are recognised.
A molecular phylogenetic study published in 2019 found that the little black cormorant was sister to the Indian cormorant.
“Little black cormorant” enters the record as species of bird. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Little, black and cormorant can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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The date and method of observation matter as much as the stated conclusion, especially where classification or consensus has changed. The source revision retrieved here is dated Oct 4, 2025. The linked authority identifier is Q529123. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1837, 1760 and 2019.
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This entry incorporates text from “Little black cormorant” 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.