Magellanic Cormorant

About the Magellanic Cormorant

The rock shag (Leucocarbo magellanicus), also known as the Magellanic cormorant, is a marine cormorant found around the southernmost coasts of South America. Its breeding range is from around Valdivia, Chile, south to Cape Horn and Tierra del Fuego, and north to Punta Tombo in Argentina. In winter it is seen further north, with individuals reaching as far as Santiago, Chile on the west coast and Uruguay on the east. The birds also breed around the coasts of the Falkland Islands.

The rock shag was formally described in 1789 by the German naturalist Johann Friedrich Gmelin in his revised and expanded edition of Carl Linnaeus's Systema Naturae. He placed it in the genus Pelecanus and coined the binomial name Pelecanus magellanicus. Gmelin based his description on the "Magellanic shag" that had been described in 1785 by the English ornithologist John Latham in his book A General Synopsis of Birds. Latham had in turn based his description on a specimen in the Leverian Museum and the account made by Georg Forster of his visit to Tierra del Fuego in December 1774 during James Cook's second voyage to the Pacific. The rock shag was formerly placed in the genus Phalacrocorax... Wikipedia →