Yang Yuangang gets a fish brought up by his cormorant at Erhai Lake, Dali, Yunnan province.

Fishing with cormorants in Erhai Lake goes back a long time. But now, only 12 families continue this practice. Erik Nilsson and Guo Anfei report

A salvo of avian torpedoes launches at Yang Yuangang's command. "Dive!" the 56-year-old yells in the Bai language, and about a dozen cormorants explode beneath the lake's ripples, their underwater trajectories traced in froth.

Moments later, two of the waterfowl erupt through the surface with the same wriggling carp clasped in both of their beaks. The fish's white belly twitches as Yang scoops the birds, still clutching their catch in their maws, up in a net.

His cormorants swish their wings and continue their tug-of-war over the carp. Before long, the fish slips out of their grip and thuds onto the bottom of his narrow boat.

Yang's family is among the last 12 who still practice this traditional form of fishing on Erhai Lake, located 2 km east of Yunnan province's Dali city, as the cormorant flies.

Sha village today is home to more than 150 yuying (cormorants, literally translated as "fish hawks") and about 1,000 households. In the 1960s, 72 families fished with more than 1,500 of the birds.

"Some of the fish the cormorants catch end up on my family's dinner table, while we sell the rest in the market," Yang says.

Fishing with cormorants is an old tradition in the country. Erik Nilsson

The hauls of fish his 15 cormorants snare bring in 30 yuan to 100 yuan a day, he says.

"We use the money to buy daily necessities," he says.

Erhai's fish sell especially well, partly because the lake is not polluted. The government bans fishing in Erhai from January to June, during which time cormorant owners stage performances for tourists.

Yang has trained cormorants for 36 years and understands the creatures intimately.

"Different seasons, climates, wind directions, schoolings of fish - all of these things can influence the birds," he explains.

Cormorants live for up to 28 years, he says, and can catch fish after they are about 100 days old.

Most catch at least 1 kg of fish daily but can haul in up to 25 kg. They must be fed half a kilogram of fingerlings and shrimp a day.

Yang shows the instructions he has written for training yuyin. They are scrawled in large script in a children's character-study book with Snoopy printed on the cover. One of the trickier parts is teaching them to obey voice commands.

Even though Erhai's cormorant tradition is fading, Yang doesn't want his children to carry it on.

"I would rather my kids go to school than learn this ancient way of fishing," Yang says.

Many of his 700 fellow fishermen in Sha village agree.

"I inherited the tradition of fishing with cormorants from my father," 60-year-old Li Yonghua says.

"But most villagers fish with nets. You can usually get more fish that way, but the birds bring in more in the wintertime, because there is less seaweed for the fish to hide in."

His son has abandoned fishing to become a carpenter, he says.

As Li speaks, one of his cormorants perched on the edge of his docked boat shakes itself dry, sending spray that catches the sunlight to look like glitter tossed in the air.

Then the bird gazes at the point where gentle waves lap the shore of Erhai - a place where the tides of change are washing over the traditional relationship these waterfowl and inhabitants have shared for centuries.