Thursday, November 15, 2012

Camera-carrying cormorant sparked fish photo mystery

It sounds like a fishy tale - a Canadian woman comes to the aid of a water bird with a camera hanging around its neck ... only to discover numerous fish photos on the memory card. But it happened to Saskatoon's Karen Gwillim in September as she was driving through the village of Craven. Approaching a bridge, she saw a young bird struggling with something, so she got out to investigate.

"It was a cormorant, a black water bird with kind of a long neck," she said. "It had this silver camera kind of dangling from its neck." When she approached the bird, which weighed about two kilograms, it didn't try to flee or resist. She took the camera off, it flapped its wings and it was gone. "I think he was relieved to have something that heavy removed," she said. "He seemed all right." With the bird saved, Gwillim turned her attention to the camera, a point-and-shoot model that had obviously been in the water for a while.



She went home, took out the memory card, let it dry out and booted up her computer. Fortunately, the pictures were intact. There were about 200 of them, many of them having been taken in October, 2011. "Lots of fishing pictures, giant fish, guys with fish, mostly," she said. There were also pictures from a wedding, some houses and other photos that seemed to be from the Shell Lake area. She posted them on her Facebook page, hoping the camera-owner would find them, but for weeks heard nothing.

However, after Gwillim was interviewed on Canadian TV on Tuesday afternoon, a Saskatoon man stepped forward to say he's in some of the pictures and knows whose camera it is. Frank Resendes said the camera owner dropped it while helping a friend haul in a fish near Craven about eight months ago. "He's going to help his buddy land this fish so he's getting closer to the edge of the water, almost falls into the water and that jars the camera out of his pocket and it falls into the canal never to be seen again," Resendes said. "It just disappears." Arrangements are being made to reunite the man with his pictures.

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