One of the founding principles here at the Audubon of Florida News Blog is 'no bathroom humor." So rather than comment directly on this story from today's Orlando Sentinel, which, while interesting, tells us nothing about cormorants we didn't already know, we'd like to share some little-known facts about cormorants and shags which our crack staff of researchers here have spent hours culling from scholarly tomes cut and pasted from Wikipedia:

Cormorants feature quite commonly in heraldry and medieval ornamentation, usually in their "wing-drying" pose, which was seen as representing the Christian cross. For example, the Norwegian municipalities of Røst, Loppa and Skjervøy have cormorants in their coat-of-arms. The species depicted in heraldry is most likely to be the Great Cormorant, the most familiar species in Europe.

In 1853, a woman wearing a dress made of cormorant feathers was found on San Nicolas Island, off the southern coast of California. She had sewn the feather dress together using whale sinews. She is known as the Lone Woman of San Nicolas and was later baptized "Juana Maria" (her original name is lost). The woman had lived alone on the island for 18 years before being rescued.

The cormorant is mentioned in Leviticus 11:17, Deuteronomy 14:17, Isiah 34:11 as an "abomination" of birds not to be eaten, containing the Lord's vengeance, and Zephaniah 2:14, as the desolation resulting from that vengeance.

The cormorant as a symbol of deception and greed is described in Milton's Paradise Lost, sitting on the Tree of Life, as an image of Satan entering Paradise in disguise before tempting Eve.