Japanese cormorant

How it lives

A coastal diving bird, called umiu ("sea cormorant") in Japan. Adults are black with a white throat and cheeks and a partly yellow bill. Young birds are plainer and browner. It nests in colonies on relatively wide cliff ledges, and also on port jetties and offshore rocks. Compared with the great cormorant, which breeds near lakes and rivers, it relies more on coastal and open-sea habitat. I did not find clutch size or lifespan in the sources I read.

Where it goes

Migratory in parts of its range. It breeds mainly on Hokkaido, Sakhalin and the southern Kuril Islands, with smaller groups on Honshu and the Korean Peninsula. The sources I read do not detail winter movements.

We only draw a journey on the map when scientists have tracked it or clearly documented it. For this animal we have not found one yet.

Populations

Least Concern (IUCN, 2018). BirdLife estimates, as quoted in a 2021 paper, are 10,000 to 100,000 birds in the breeding season and 25,000 to 100,000 in total. In Hokkaido about 1,900 breeding pairs were counted in the 1980s, and numbers there are believed to have risen since. It occurs along the coasts of China, Japan, North and South Korea, the Russian Far East and Taiwan. The sources I read name no specific threats.