May 23, 2018 · cormorant this large diving bird is taken as the type of an insatiably greedy or rapacious person. The name is recorded from Middle English, and comes via Old French from medieval Latin corvus marinus ‘sea-raven’.

The Galápagos cormorant, also known as the flightless cormorant, is the only one of the world's 29 cormorant species that is flightless. It is a large bird, measuring about 35 to 40 inches (89 to 100 centimeters) long and weighing anywhere from 5 to 9 pounds (2.5 to 4 kilograms)—making it the heaviest bird in the cormorant family.

Cormorant species of the Northern Hemisphere are colored glossy blackish, while those of the Southern Hemisphere tend to have a grayish body with white underparts and some black markings. Males are usually somewhat larger than females; otherwise, the sexes look alike, although they may differ in behavior, at least during the breeding season.

Cormorant colonies are loud, raucous places. These birds commonly kill the stand of trees that they nest in, mostly through the caustic influence of their copious defecations. The most widespread species is the common or great cormorant ( Phalacrocorax carbo ), which occurs in North America , Eurasia, and Australia .

Some examples of species that have been affected by this type of ecotoxicity include the peregrine falcon (Falco peregrinus), bald eagle (Haliaeetus leucocephalus), osprey (Pandion haliaetus), brown pelican (Pelecanus occidentalis), double-crested cormorant (Phalacrocorax auritus), and western grebe (Aechmophorus occidentalis).

As John Quincy Adams (1767–1848), the sixth president, complained: “There is something so gross and repugnant to my feelings in this cormorant appetite for office, this barefaced and repeated effort to get an old and meritorious public servant turned out of place by a bankrupt to get in, that it needed all of my sense of the allowances to ...