Shi drum fishing: the pale raven with a beard on its chin
An Italian says corvo, a Croat korbel, a Maltese gurbell, an Albanian korbi, an Englishman, if in doubt, “sea crow” — and you still don’t know which fish he means. Because along the coasts of the Mediterranean live two drums that share these names: one dark, one pale. Where a language still wants to keep them apart, it adds an adjective. This article is about the pale one — *Umbrina cirrosa*, the shi drum, also called bearded umbrine, sea crow or corb: the drum with the beard on its chin.
Two ravens, one name
How far the names overlap shows in the GBIF name lists for both species (key 2399669 for *Umbrina cirrosa* and 2399670 for the brown meagre, *Sciaena umbra*, read on 26 September 2026). Italian “Corbo”, “Corvo” and “Corbello” appear in both lists, and so does “Ombrina”. Maltese “Gurbell” is in both, Spanish “Verrugato” and “Corvallo” as well, and English “Corb” too. Italian corvo means raven, and so does Albanian korb; English lists give “Sea Crow” for one and “sea raven” for the other, and FishBase lists “鴉鯛” for China — a sea bream written with the character for crow.
⭐ And then there are the languages that fall back on a colour. Albanian says “Korbi i bardhë”, the white raven, for our fish — and “korbi i zi”, the black raven, for the brown meagre. Russian separates “Светлый горбыль” (the pale one) from “Тёмный горбыль” (the dark one), in Ukrainian it is “Горбань світлий”, in Estonian, according to FishBase, “Hele umbriin”, and for Italy FishBase also lists “Ombrina bianca”, the white ombrina. German took the easy way out and handed out two words: “Gewöhnlicher Umber” for the pale one, “Meerrabe” for the dark one — much as English keeps shi drum and brown meagre apart.
Named after a shadow — but whose?
The origin of scientific names is recorded by the ETYFish Project; its page on the drum family (SCIAENIDAE) is dated v. 10.0 – 28 July 2026. For the genus *Umbrina* Cuvier 1816 it says the name comes “from umbra and/or ombrina” — names that on the coasts of Provence and Italy were given “in various ways to our three main sciaenoid species”, sometimes to one, sometimes to another of the three big drums. Umbra is Latin for shadow. FishBase explains the same name differently: shadow “in the sense of phantom; due to its quick movements” — a phantom, because of its quick movements. And for Germany, FishBase lists, besides “Umberfisch”, the name “Schattenfisch” — shadow fish.
A second find at ETYFish makes the story even better. Under the genus name *Atractoscion* it says that the Greek skión (σκιών) — likewise from σκιά, shadow — was, according to the naturalist Rondelet (*Libri de piscibus marinis*, 1554), the modern Greek name of *Umbrina cirrosa*. Today GBIF lists “Σκιός” for the brown meagre, and “Μυλοκόπι” for our fish. ⚠️ Whether the shadow name wandered from the pale fish to the dark one over the centuries, or whether Rondelet was simply wrong, neither source says — they just stand side by side. The Greek mylokopi, by the way, has a family of its own around the Aegean and the Black Sea: Turkish “Minekop” and “Minakop”, Albanian “Millokop”, Romanian “Milacop” (all FishBase).
The beard on the chin
ETYFish explains the species name in one sentence: *cirrosa* means “with a curl or tendril”, “referring to short and rigid barbel on chin” — the short, stiff barbel on the chin. English Wikipedia, citing the Marine Species Identification Portal, describes it more closely: pierced by a pore at its tip. Add a small, underslung mouth with fine brush-like teeth, a grey-silver to brownish body with a metallic sheen, dark longitudinal lines along the back and a jet-black edge on the rear margin of the gill cover. Malta wrote the feature straight into the name: FishBase lists “Gurbell tad-daqna” there — the gurbell with the beard.
- Shi drum (*Umbrina cirrosa*): barbel on the chin, small, underslung mouth, dark longitudinal lines on the back, black edge on the gill cover.
- Brown meagre (*Sciaena umbra*): according to English Wikipedia a large, horizontal mouth reaching back below the eye, black anal and pelvic fins with a white leading edge, dorsal and tail fins yellow with a black margin. The description makes no mention of a barbel.
- The short version: beard and stripes — the pale raven. Big mouth and black-and-white belly fins — the dark one.
Where it holds and what it eats
- Depth and bottom: FishBase gives 0 to 100 metres, living on the bottom, in coastal waters over rock and sand. The juveniles move into estuaries.
- Range: the eastern Atlantic from the Bay of Biscay and Gibraltar to southern Morocco, the Mediterranean, the Black Sea and the Sea of Azov (FishBase). According to English Wikipedia it is absent around the larger islands — and it has travelled through the Suez Canal into the Gulf of Suez, one of the few fish to make the journey from the Mediterranean into the Red Sea rather than the other way round.
- Prey: FishBase says briefly “bottom invertebrates”. The IUCN assessment (via English Wikipedia) lists sardines, anchovies, mackerel, cuttlefish, molluscs and worms; the main prey remains the bottom-dwelling invertebrates.
- Size and age: 40 cm total length is typical; FishBase gives maximums of 104 cm, 11.1 kg and 18 years.
- Spawning: according to the IUCN, spawning begins in May and peaks in June; each female lays several batches of eggs (FishBase).
- A fish that talks: the males produce sound pulses to attract females — as described in a study in the *Journal of Fish Biology* (Picciulin and colleagues, 2016), which compared it with the brown meagre. In English the whole family is called “drums”.
How to fish for it — thinking from the biology
English Wikipedia calls it a species targeted by anglers and spearfishers, and FishBase explicitly lists it as “gamefish: yes”. None of the sources describes how to catch it — but the mouth tells the story. A fish with a small, downward-facing mouth and brush teeth, whose main prey lives on the bottom, takes what lies on the bottom. ⚠️ What follows is a conclusion drawn from mouth and prey, not a catch statistic: natural bait on the bottom — worm, strips of cuttlefish, small crustaceans — fished where sand meets rock, and where fresh water runs into the sea, because according to FishBase the juveniles move into estuaries. And because the IUCN lists the species as vulnerable (more on that below), releasing it is more than a gesture here. The minimum size is set by each country — check it locally before you keep a fish.
Four contradictions, left standing
- How big? English Wikipedia gives a maximum length of 73 cm, citing FishBase (retrieved 2016). FishBase itself now gives 104 cm and 11.1 kg. And the angling European record, according to Wikipedia, citing the European Federation of Sea Anglers, stands at 11.2 kg — 100 grams more than the highest weight FishBase has published.
- Where not? The same Wikipedia says the species is absent around the larger islands of the Mediterranean. The European record, according to the same page, dates from 1992 — off Corsica.
- How threatened? The IUCN lists the shi drum as “Vulnerable” (A2b), assessed on 30 July 2019. FishBase, meanwhile, rates its vulnerability to fishing only as “Moderate vulnerability (43 of 100)”, but its vulnerability to climate change as “High to very high (70 of 100)”. According to the IUCN, landings fell from an average of 1,393 tonnes (1986–1990) to 278 tonnes (2001–2005) — minus 80 per cent. ⭐ With the red porgy in this series it was exactly the other way round: IUCN “Least Concern”, FishBase “highly vulnerable”.
- Why shadow? FishBase says: because of its quick movements, the fish as a phantom. ETYFish says: because umbra and ombrina were already folk names for three different drums. Both explanations stand here; neither is discarded.
Six names that lead to the wrong fish
- “Corvo”, “Corbo”, “Corbello”, “Gurbell”, “Corb”, “Verrugato”, “Corvallo”. All of them appear in the GBIF lists of both species. Without a qualifier you don’t know whether you mean the pale raven or the dark one — ask about the beard.
- “Corvina”. FishBase lists “Corvina” in Portugal for the shi drum, GBIF also lists it in Italy, Spain and Portugal for the brown meagre — and in this series corvina is the Spanish name of the meagre, *Argyrosomus regius*. One word, three fish.
- “maigre”. Appears in the Spanish GBIF list for the shi drum and in the French list for the brown meagre. But in French, maigre is the meagre — which has its own article in this series.
- “Ombrina” on its own. In Italian, that is our fish. But GBIF also lists “Ombrina” for the brown meagre, and the “ombrina bocca d’oro”, the golden-mouthed ombrina, is once again the meagre.
- “Σολομός”, “Salamun”, “Šalomun”. GBIF lists Σολομός among the Greek names, FishBase Salamun and Šalomun among the Croatian ones. Σολομός is Greek for salmon. ⚠️ Why the name is here, no source explains. The Croatian GBIF list also contains entries that clearly come from other languages and refer to other fish — a name list is a collection, not a dictionary.
- “Горбыль” without an adjective. In Russian, светлый горбыль is the pale drum, тёмный or чёрный горбыль the brown meagre. Search for just “горбыль” and you get both.
Which leaves the question every article in this series starts with: when. Bottom, depth and prey are set out above, and they are fixed. What changes every day is everything else — air pressure and its direction, wind, current, turbidity, the distance to dusk and dawn. For a fish that hunts bottom invertebrates on the edge between sand and rock and off the river mouths, the time window is half the work: the edge stays, the hour doesn’t. That is exactly what StrikeAhead calculates — it takes the conditions on your water and tells you when the trip is worth it. And if you don’t know the area, StrikeAhead Pathfinder tells you who to go out with: curated guides and skippers, personally vetted before listing — licence and insurance —, with verified catches instead of promo photos, no paid ranking and, for you as an angler, no booking fee.