For five years I had the immense privilege and pleasure of teaching at the College of Europe in Bruges. This evening, once our work and our meal were both over, I wandered around my old haunts. I was standing outside the College, on the Dijver, when a lot of splashing and flapping in the canal behind me attracted my attention. The title of this post sounds like a fable from La Fontaine or Aesop, but what I saw was a large eel and a much larger cormorant engaged in mortal battle. The eel’s primary defence was to wrap itself tightly around the cormorant’s neck, threatening to axphyxiate it. The cormorant’s – risky – tactics were to dip its head and let the eel go in the water so as to encourage it to uncoil itself and then to grab it again with its beak. But each time that it re-caught the eel the eel re-wrapped itself around the bird’s neck. They made quite a commotion and the struggle lasted for a good five minutes. Finally, perhaps with more luck than judgement, the cormorant managed to fling the eel into the air and caught it, head first. Now the eel was halfway down the bird’s gullet but it still put up quite a fight before eventually sliding down out of sight. Not having seen anything like that before, I thought it must be a rare occurence. But back at the hotel I did an internet image search with the key words ‘eel’ and ‘cormorant’ and discovered that it is a frequent sight and that the cormorant’s technique of flinging the eel up into the air is also common. I am not sure I would like a live eel wriggling around in my stomach but, then…
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