[EBB Sightings] cormorant

My birding companion often walks around Lake Merritt in downtown 
Oakland and recently has become
mystified by the recurring sighting of a dead cormorant.  Here is, The 
Lake
Merritt Mystery:

At Lake Merritt, if you stand on the path with the children's 
playground at
your back and face the lake, you'll see that the second island out has a
big, leafy tree in the middle. On the upper left side of that tree 
there are
some bare branches. In a fork in those branches there's a dead 
cormorant,
hanging by a wing. This is odd enough. How did the cormorant get there? 
Why
is it hanging in that position?

The plot thickens when you consider that last year at around this time 
there
was another dead cormorant in the exact same spot, but that one was 
hanging
by its neck which was caught right in the V of the bare branches.

What's going on here? Is this the cormorant equivalent of a suicide leap
spot? Is there a psychotic cormorant killer who strikes once a  year on 
the
same spot? The thing is, the branches are so narrow and far out where 
the
cormorant is hanging, I don't think they'd support the weight of any
predator, much less a human.

If anybody has any theories, I'd love to hear them. Last year the 
cormorant
corpse was up there for a couple of weeks so if you're interested, I 
assume
this one will be there for a while also.
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