Cormorants

Once used as living fish hooks.

There’s scarcely a bird in the world as unfairly maligned, deemed the world over as a dreadful seed due to its awkward proportions and reportedly ravenous appetite for bait fish.  But this discomfited family is of an ancient lineage, one of the oldest of all the birds and with similar ancestors reaching all the way back to the dinosaurs. Below, Plymouth Waterfront.

“For me, it is far better to grasp the Universe as it really is than to persist in delusion, however satisfying and reassuring.”
― Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark