The potential success of a cormorant starts even before birth, and fishermen start to train their ‘children’ at an early age. Every year, the owner of the birds selects a few of them for reproduction. He then takes them to a person acting as a bird “matchmaker” in the village. Here, he makes “presentations”, and finally the birds select their favored mate. The role of the “matchmaker” is to determine which birds are likely to be compatible, and finally give birth to future fishing champions. This will have a great bearing on the fisherman’s income, so the “matchmaker” is very well respected in the village.  

When cormorant couples are formed, then begins another ritual: the choice of a good location to build a nest. Everything is done to ensure comfort and protection for the birds, so that the female will produce eggs of the best quality. Each day, fishermen visit the nest location to check that everything is in order. Even when the eggs are laid, fishermen still support the birds, providing them with food, and protecting the nest from potential predators or thieves. This lasts until the eggs can be removed from the nest safely and brought back home with the parents. Then the fisherman acts as a parent himself, taking care of the eggs up to the time the young cormorants are strong enough to fend for themselves. The newborn birds quickly adopt the fisherman as a parent. This is a crucial stage in their education, since the young bird will then learn the fisherman’s “codified language”, and when it is strong enough and understands the basics of this language, it will join mature birds on the fishing team to learn fishing techniques: First as a spectator, then gradually as a participant. At an early age, the fisherman ties a small rope around the bird’s neck to prevent it from swallowing fish and teach it to bring them back to him instead, up to the time the cormorant is fully trained. 

Recently, with the development of more industries in Guilin, the Li River has become more polluted, and the population of fish has declined dramatically. Fishermen have started looking at alternative sources of income, since they can not sell enough fish on the market to support their families. Gradually, as some villagers started to work in the tourism industry, some of the fishermen did too.

But this meant they did not have the time to raise new generations of cormorants, and the tradition started to slowly disappear, year after year. When the film director Zhang Yimou opened his “Impression Liu Sanjie” show in Yangshuo, near Guilin, he hired many fishermen as performers. This allowed them to guarantee a stable source of income for their family, one that was an improvement over past years. Finally, most fishermen decided to start a new life and embrace the new economy. They abandoned their ancestral occupation of fishing with cormorants. But though this long lasting tradition is slowly disappearing from the area, it will remain forever in the memories of all who witnessed it as an extraordinary example of collaboration between man and beast.