Spectacled Cormorant

Table of Contents

The discovery of the spectacled cormorant and several other animals

When Danish naval officer Vitus Bering and German physician and naturalist Georg Wilhelm Steller set out on the Second Kamchatka Expedition in search of the legendary João-da-Gama-Land in June 1741, aboard the St. Peter and accompanied by the St. Paul, Bering did not know that this would be his final voyage. A storm separated the two ships soon after their departure. Four months later, with much of the crew already suffering from scurvy and drinking water running low, the St. Peter ran aground on a reef in November 1741. It was Bering Island in the northwestern Pacific, later named after Bering, who was buried there about a month later.

The exhausted crew decided to spend the winter in earthen huts along the coast. Until spring arrived and a new boat could be built from the remains of the St. Peter, Steller devoted himself to the flora and fauna of the island, which humans had never before visited. “The sheer abundance and tame self-assurance of the animals clearly indicate that this land must be scarcely inhabited or completely uninhabited,” Steller told Bering. Among Steller’s discoveries on the island were “a peculiar sea eagle,” later identified as Steller’s sea eagle (Haliaeetus pelagicus), a gigantic sea cow, the Steller sea lion (Eumetopias jubatus), and an enormous cormorant—the spectacled cormorant.

While the crew of the St. Peter remained on Bering Island, the largest of Russia’s Commander Islands, spectacled cormorants were still abundant, as were Arctic foxes, sea otters, fur seals, and partridges. By midwinter, when sea otters and fur seals had become scarcer and flocks of eiders stayed far offshore, the surviving sailors hunted spectacled cormorants to avoid starvation. According to Steller, the meat from one bird was enough to feed three hungry men.

Others later came to appreciate the meat of spectacled cormorants, which Steller described as “tasty and juicy.” The arrival of sea otter hunter Emilian Basov on the island in 1743 marks the beginning of documented human settlement and ecological destruction. From 1825, the Russian-American Company, a trading enterprise of the Russian Empire focused primarily on the fur trade, brought Indigenous people from the Aleutian Islands to Bering Island to hunt. The following year, another group of Aleut people and residents of Kamchatka founded the first known permanent settlement on the island.

Word quickly spread that Bering Island offered profitable whaling grounds and was home to large numbers of Arctic foxes, sea otters, and other animals with valuable pelts, attracting more whalers, seal hunters, and fur traders to the region. Georg Steller himself was not entirely blameless for Bering Island’s rapid development into an important fur-trading center. After returning to Kamchatka, Steller wrote in his first letters and reports about the potential profits to be made from furs obtained on Bering Island.

In The Devil’s Cormorant: A Natural History (2013), author and illustrator Richard J. King writes that the crew of the St. Peter returned home from Bering Island with almost 900 pelts to sell. Steller had to leave nearly all the specimens he had collected on the island, but returned with around 300 sea otter pelts. He reportedly bought some from his shipmates in Kamchatka and received others as gifts of gratitude.

Spectacled Cormorant – fact sheet

alternative names	Pallas’s cormorant, Pallas’ cormorant, Steller’s spectacled cormorant
scientific names	Urile perspicillatus, Phalacrocorax perspicillatus, Compsohalieus perspicillatus, Carbo perspicillatus, Pallasicarbo perspicillatus, Graculus perspicillatus
original historical range	Bering Island (northwestern Pacific)
time of extinction	around 1852
cause of extinction	hunting
IUCN status	Extinct

Spectacled cormorants: Too naive to survive

Spectacled cormorants had no fur, but their meat—and their feathers—were highly valued by the Aleut people and the island’s other residents. British zoologist Lionel Walter Rothschild wrote about this in Extinct Birds in 1907:

“Formerly it [der Kormoran] is said to have been numerous, but the natives were fond of its flesh, which formed their principal diet when other meat was difficult to obtain. Probably it would not so soon have become extinct if it had not been that their rather short wings resulted in a certain slowness of locomotion on land and in the air.”

It was not only the spectacled cormorants’ slowness that made them easy prey, but also their isolated evolution on uninhabited Bering Island, which meant that the birds did not regard humans as enemies. The period from their discovery to their extermination was too short for the birds to adapt their behavior to the “new predators.” In 1936, Russian ornithologist Boris K. Stegmann offered his own interpretation of their island tameness:

“All that is known about these birds’ way of life is that they were very stupid and could easily be clubbed to death, which the inhabitants of the Commander Islands accomplished with great success.”

Ueber das Flugvermögen der ausgestorbenen Scharbe Phalacrocorax perspicillatus Pall., 1936, B. K. Stegmann

In 1920, ornithologist Ernst Hartert proposed another explanation for the spectacled cormorant’s extinction. In The Birds of the Commander Islands, he considered it possible that human persecution had exterminated the species, but also suggested disease as a potential factor. For comparison, he cited a later epidemic during the winter of 1876/77 that killed thousands of pelagic cormorants (Urile pelagicus) on the Commander Islands.

Remarkably, present-day researchers have again discussed disease as a possible additional factor. In an interview published by the news outlet Kamchatka-Inform in November 2025, Arkady Savinetsky said there were indications that mass epizootics—the widespread occurrence of infectious animal diseases—may have contributed to the decline. Other cormorant species could have recovered from such population crashes, whereas the spectacled cormorant may not have done so.

There is still no direct evidence that an epidemic contributed to the spectacled cormorant’s extinction. The hypothesis is nevertheless interesting because Hartert had already identified epidemics as a possible additional factor more than a century ago. The principal cause of extinction is still considered to be the intensive hunting of a small and unwary island population.

In Die ausgestorbenen Vögel der Welt (1986), ornithologist Dieter Luther also notes that predation by the Arctic fox found on Bering Island (Vulpes lagopus), a natural predator of the spectacled cormorant, may have accelerated its extinction. This would have applied only after human hunting had already “reduced the population numerically below its minimum viable level.”

The precise date on which the last spectacled cormorant died is no longer known. Steller still described the species as common on Bering Island in 1741 and 1742. When zoologist Leonhard Stejneger arrived on the Commander Islands in the early 1880s, however, he found no living spectacled cormorants, only bones. Indigenous Unangas told him that the last birds had disappeared about 30 years earlier—around 1852. A study published in 2024 by Theodore Squires and Alexander L. Bond notes, however, that none of the reports dating from after 1840 is supported by verifiable evidence. The extinction therefore probably occurred in the mid-19th century, but its timing remains uncertain.

The cause was not merely hunting, but an entire historical process. Squires and Bond emphasize that the spectacled cormorant’s disappearance was probably closely tied to the influx of Russian fur traders and the consequences of the forced relocation of Indigenous Unangas. After Bering Island’s discovery, the North Pacific increasingly became a focus of the fur trade. Sea otters, fur seals, and Arctic foxes made the region economically attractive. At the same time, Indigenous Unangas from the Aleutian region were exploited, enslaved, or forcibly relocated and compelled to hunt for Russian commercial interests. The spectacled cormorant was also exploited within this system. It was large, meaty, and unwary. Regular hunting could therefore quickly become devastating for a small island population.

What Remains of the Spectacled Cormorant

The great auk, a flightless bird that once lived in the North Atlantic, disappeared because of relentless hunting at roughly the same time as the spectacled cormorant. At least 78 great auk skins or mounted specimens, more than 20 complete skeletons, and numerous eggs survive in collections and museums today, whereas comparatively little remains of the spectacled cormorant.

The scarcity of surviving spectacled cormorant material makes reconstructing its history difficult. In their review, Squires and Bond identify just six skins or mounted specimens in four museums: the Finnish Museum of Natural History in Helsinki, the Naturalis Biodiversity Center in Leiden, the Zoological Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences in St. Petersburg, and the Natural History Museum in Tring. The provenance of these specimens is not fully known; according to Squires and Bond, all entered scientific collections through Sitka, then the capital of Russian America. Earlier reports of a specimen in Dresden and material in the American Museum of Natural History in New York have proved incorrect.

There are also numerous bone finds. In 2024, Squires and Bond recorded more than 90 previously known bone specimens of the spectacled cormorant. Particularly important, however, are 379 additional skeletal fragments recovered during excavations on Bering Island in 2021, which could not yet be fully assessed in their review. As Russian researchers Arkady Savinetsky and Stanislav Samsonov reported in a 2025 interview, the more recent finds include exceptionally well-preserved bones from which nearly complete spectacled cormorant skeletons could be reconstructed. This material now permits much more precise conclusions about the extinct species’ body size, flight capacity, and way of life.

A study published in 2026 presented the first detailed osteological analysis of this extensive bone material and compared it with living cormorant species.

The flight capacity of Bering Island’s cormorants

Many birds endemic to small islands without predators lost the ability to fly over the course of evolution—did the spectacled cormorant lose it too? Whether it could fly was long a matter of controversy. Its exceptional size, life on remote islands, and historical accounts were repeatedly interpreted as evidence of limited flight capacity. In The Doomsday Book of Animals (1981), David Day described it as a “nearly flightless, slow, and unsuspecting” bird. The IUCN, which has listed the spectacled cormorant as Extinct on its Red List since 1998, also calls it a “poor flyer” when discussing its disappearance.

Stegmann had already challenged this view in 1936. In Ueber das Flugvermögen der ausgestorbenen Scharbe, he noted, among other points, that the bird’s original description by German naturalist Peter Simon Pallas contained no indication of severely limited flight capacity. Stegmann also compared the spectacled cormorant’s bones and anatomy with those of other cormorants. He concluded that no osteological features indicated a reduction in flight capacity:

“In general, therefore, one can say that the osteological features of Ph. perspicillatus in no way indicate a reduction in this bird’s flight capacity. On the contrary, everything indicates that this species possessed fully developed and normally functioning flight muscles that could not have been functionless. (…) It can therefore be stated with certainty that Ph. perspicillatus was not merely capable of flight, but must also have been a strong long-distance flyer (…).”

Not everyone shares Stegmann’s view. Ornithologist Clive Roots compared the spectacled cormorant in his book Flightless Birds (2006) with the only living flightless cormorant species, the flightless cormorant (Nannopterum harrisi). It reaches a similar body length and weighs about 2.3 to four kilograms. Birds cannot be too heavy if they are to fly, and if the flightless cormorant was already too heavy to fly, the spectacled cormorant should have been even more so. Because substantially higher weights were assumed for the spectacled cormorant at the time, it seemed plausible that its flight capacity might also have been severely limited.

Richard J. King argued similarly in The Devil’s Cormorant (2013). Drawing on Steller’s historical figures, he assumed a body weight of about 5.4 to 6.4 kilograms and described the spectacled cormorant’s flight as sluggish and awkward:

“If the spectacled cormorant was indeed that heavy, it weighed almost twice as much as the great cormorant [Phalacrocorax carbo], one of the largest flying cormorants alive today, whose wings are about the same length. Thus, if the spectacled cormorant could fly, it certainly did not do so very efficiently.”

New bone finds now provide strong evidence against near-flightlessness. Stanislav V. Samsonov and his colleagues examined more than 450 subfossil bones from Bering Island, including two incomplete skeletons, for their 2026 study. This is the largest known collection of spectacled cormorant bones to date. The researchers analyzed the shoulder girdle and the proportions of the wing and leg bones, among other features, and compared them with living cormorants. The spectacled cormorant’s flight apparatus was not substantially different from that of flying cormorant species. It shows none of the reduction in the flight apparatus characteristic of the flightless cormorant.

In November 2025, Arkady Savinetsky and Stanislav Samsonov of the A.N. Severtsov Institute of Ecology and Evolution of the Russian Academy of Sciences had already discussed these findings in an interview. Savinetsky said that the new bone finds had settled the question of possible flightlessness: the spectacled cormorant had been capable of normal flight, although as a large and heavy bird it may have flown only infrequently. Samsonov emphasized that comparison with the flightless cormorant revealed clear anatomical differences and that the spectacled cormorant showed no signs of a reduced flight apparatus.

The new finds also revised the earlier idea of an exceptionally heavy bird. Based on the circumference of the thigh bones, Samsonov estimates the spectacled cormorant’s body mass at about 3.8 kilograms. It was therefore considerably heavier than the pelagic cormorant (Urile pelagicus) or the red-faced cormorant (U. urile), but much lighter than the previously cited estimates of 5.4 to 6.4 kilograms.

Current research therefore strongly suggests that the spectacled cormorant was fully capable of flight. Its bones cannot reveal how often, how far, or how efficiently it actually flew. The new studies do show, however, that its flight apparatus—unlike that of the flightless cormorant—shows no adaptations to the loss of flight.

Steller was the only person to study living spectacled cormorants

Georg Steller was the only naturalist ever able to study living spectacled cormorants. Almost everything we know about the appearance and behavior of the living spectacled cormorant comes from his notes, made on Bering Island in 1741 and 1742. His original manuscript is now lost, however, and the descriptions survive only through the translations by Pallas, who was the first to study Steller’s manuscripts in the late 18th century. Until 1837, when the first preserved specimens of the bird were brought to Alaska, Steller’s notes were science’s only source of information about the spectacled cormorant. Pallas also relied exclusively on Steller’s notes when he scientifically described the spectacled cormorant in 1811. Pallas never met Georg Steller and never saw a spectacled cormorant—alive or dead.

At up to one meter long, the extinct spectacled cormorant is considered the largest bird in the cormorant family (that is, Phalacrocoracidae) and is therefore sometimes cited as an example of island gigantism. Based on Steller’s account, Pallas provided the first recognized description of the species:

“Of the size of a very large goose (…) white patches on the flanks (…) The body is entirely black (…) A few long, white, narrow pendant plumes round the neck, as in Herons (…) Occiput with a huge tuft (…) Skin round the base of the bill bare, red, blue and white, mixed, as in a turkey (…) Round the eyes a thick, bare white patch of skin (…), like a pair of spectacles (…) Female smaller, without crest and spectacles (From Steller)”

Extinct Birds, 1907, W. L. Rothschild

The examination of new bone finds now also supports Steller’s statement that females were smaller. Samsonov and his team closely studied the extensive spectacled cormorant skeletal material for their 2026 study. The size differences among the individuals examined indicate pronounced sexual dimorphism, with males larger than females. Anatomical evidence thus provides new support for Steller’s observation made more than 280 years ago. The bones cannot reveal, however, whether females truly lacked both a crest and the conspicuous “spectacles.”

Apart from its slowness and lack of fear toward humans, little is known about the spectacled cormorant’s behavior and way of life. Luther assumes that its life history and behavior largely resembled those of other members of the genus Urile, especially the pelagic cormorant.

What bones reveal about hunting and diet

Samsonov and his colleagues compared spectacled cormorant skeletal material with living cormorant species. In simplified terms, cormorants can be divided into species that pursue schools of fish in open water and those that forage closer to shore and on the seafloor. For the latter, maximum speed is less important than the ability to push off powerfully when diving and maneuver close to the bottom.

According to Samsonov’s analysis (2026), the spectacled cormorant belonged to this second group. The proportions of its leg bones resemble those of its close relatives, the pelagic cormorant and the red-faced cormorant. Its comparatively short tarsometatarsus—a lower-leg bone—probably enabled a powerful push-off when diving. The shape of its hind limbs therefore suggests that the spectacled cormorant foraged primarily on the seafloor. Its larger body size may also have enabled it to dive deeper than the smaller pelagic and red-faced cormorants.

Further evidence comes from an analysis of stable isotopes in the bones. At the time of the 2025 interview, these studies had not yet been published in full. They cannot identify individual prey species, but they do indicate where an animal foraged and the trophic level of its prey. Preliminary results suggest that the spectacled cormorant fed in the coastal zone and occupied roughly the same trophic level as the Commander Islands’ other cormorant species. Despite its exceptional body size, it therefore appears not to have preferred especially large prey. Samsonov suggests that its diet consisted mainly of small fish and crustaceans.

Little is known about other aspects of its life history. The spectacled cormorant probably remained mainly along the coasts and bred on offshore rocks and small rocky islets. Such nesting sites likely offered the birds protection from Arctic foxes, the only terrestrial mammals originally found on the Commander Islands. What its nests looked like, how many eggs a female laid, and how long the young were cared for remain unknown.

Spectacled cormorants were originally assigned to the genus Phalacrocorax. In 2021, however, the International Ornithologists’ Union (IOC), drawing on a 2014 study of cormorant classification, adopted a reclassification under which the extinct spectacled cormorant and other North Pacific cormorant species now belong to the genus Urile.

Range: The spectacled cormorant as a relict on Bering Island

When the spectacled cormorant was discovered in the mid-18th century, its range was confined to Bering Island in the Commander Islands. The IUCN continues to mention the possibility that the species may also have occurred along the nearby coast of the Kamchatka Peninsula and on several adjacent islands. The last spectacled cormorants are said to have taken refuge around 1850 on the small islet of Ariy Rock off the northwestern tip of Bering Island.

A study by geologist Junya Watanabe published in 2018 suggests that the spectacled cormorant’s historical range must have been considerably larger. Fossil remains found in northeastern Japan show that the species occurred there around 120,000 years ago. This was the first pre-Holocene evidence that it had lived outside Bering Island, extending its known geographic range by about 2,400 kilometers.

Watanabe concludes that since the Pleistocene, and probably before its first contact with humans, the spectacled cormorant underwent a massive contraction or shift in its range. This may have resulted from a decline in ocean productivity and climatic changes around 17,000 years ago, which could have affected the local cormorant population and led to its disappearance from Japan. Watanabe concludes that the Bering Island population was already a relict when the species was scientifically discovered.

Some scientists have speculated in the past about other regions where spectacled cormorants may have lived. In 1991, for example, prehistoric remains found on the Aleutian island of Amchitka in Alaska were thought to belong to the species. In 2005, however, American ornithologist Storrs L. Olson refuted this identification by assigning the bones to the double-crested cormorant (Nannopterum auritum). In Contributions to the History of Pallas’ Cormorant (1890), Stejneger also suggested that the spectacled cormorant once occurred along the northeastern coast of Siberia, a claim Stegmann regarded as unfounded. To date—apart from the 2018 study—there is no unequivocal evidence that spectacled cormorants lived outside Bering Island.

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