Cormorant Soup

Hamish Taylor from Flodaby on east Harris always used to make a cormorant casserole using the smaller cousin of the cormorant, the shag. He told me the shag has its ‘season’, i.e. autumn and winter, when the young have matured to independence of the parent bird and the parents have recovered condition after their summer breeding season and summer-spawned juvenile fish are in relative abundance for the bird to feed on.

He told me that since cormorants or shags eat on