The Bird That Wouldn’t Fly Away
In September 2012, Karen Gwillim was driving through the village of Craven, Saskatchewan, when a bird at the roadside caught her eye. It was a double-crested cormorant (Phalacrocorax auritus), the only cormorant species found in Saskatchewan, and it was clearly struggling. Her first thought was an injury. It wasn’t. Something heavy was wrapped around the bird’s neck, banging against its chest.
The cormorant weighed about 4.4 pounds (2 kg), ordinary for its kind. What it was dragging turned out to be a camera, still clipped to its strap. Gwillim walked straight up to it, and the bird didn’t bolt or flap away, it just stood there and let her come, which is unusual for a wild cormorant.
Why Would an Exhausted Bird Let a Human Touch It?
That calm was the real tell. Cormorants are built to dive and chase fish, not haul extra weight through water. Their uropygial gland produces little waterproofing oil, which is why they’re often seen standing with wings spread to dry after a swim, their bodies are tuned for moving cleanly through water, nothing more.
A camera tangled around the neck undoes that tuning: diving, swimming, even balance all get harder. Push an animal far enough into exhaustion, and the instinct to flee a stranger can simply run out.
No one has explained how the camera got looped around its neck, lost underwater and snagged by chance? Picked at by a curious bird? Even those closest to the story admit they’re guessing.
The Rescue, and a Waterlogged Clue
Gwillim worked the strap loose and lifted the camera away. The cormorant flapped off immediately. “I think he was relieved to have something that heavy removed,” she said. “He seemed all right.”
The camera itself was the real find: a silver point-and-shoot, worn and dulled from a long stretch underwater. By any reasonable expectation, whatever was stored inside it was gone for good.
How Does a Memory Card Survive a Swim?
Gwillim took the camera home, pulled the memory card, let it dry fully, and plugged it into her computer. Roughly 200 photos came up, readable and intact (one outlet later counted 239).
That’s less strange than it sounds. A memory card stores data as electrical charge sealed inside flash-memory cells, with nothing mechanical to jam and nothing magnetic to erase. Water usually damages a camera’s circuit board, connectors, and battery contacts, not the chip itself, as long as everything dries before it’s powered on again, the same reason phones dropped in lakes often die while their SD cards survive.
Photos from October 2011, Looking for an Owner
Many of the recovered photos were time-stamped October 2011, close to a year before the rescue, showing men holding up big fish, possibly from a trip near Last Mountain Lake.
Gwillim posted the images to Facebook hoping the owner would spot them, but weeks passed with no response. She then told the story on CBC Afternoon Edition, interviewed by host Craig Lederhouse. A man named Frank Resendes, one of the men in the photos, saw the segment and came forward. He said the owner had dropped the camera into a canal around eight months earlier, a timeline that doesn’t quite match photos dated nearly a year before the bird was found.
What We Still Don’t Know
Some pieces never locked into place: no one confirmed exactly how a lost camera ended up wrapped around a wild bird’s neck, and the mismatched accounts of where it went into the water, a canal, by Resendes’s telling, or Last Mountain Lake, by the photos’ timing, were never reconciled.
Nothing confirms the camera ever made it back to the person who lost it.
Maybe that’s fitting: a wild bird got saved, a stranger dried out a memory card that had no business surviving, and a set of photos went looking for the person who took them. Not every story like that closes cleanly, and that loose thread is exactly what makes it worth remembering.