Three cormorants hanging out at the end of the piling field today, plus one in the water, fishing, and one flying by. Two were young ones, and I've seen as many as seven at one time over the last few weeks. I guess we had a bumper crop this year. Don't know where they nest, but they sure like to fish my pier. So do the seagulls, who also produced more young ones than I remember from other years, and boy are young seagulls even more loud and pushy than adults. They have to share the fish, though, with a serious-looking Chinese man, who comes every couple of mornings and sets up two businesslike rods and a plastic pail. He does well, too. I don't know what it is he's catching, but the fish that, by breeding around those pilings, saved the west side of Manhattan from becoming a six-lane highway -- in the days when an Environmental Impact Statement had some impact -- was the striped bass. Thank you, striped bass.