Corps of Engineers to Slaughter 16,000 Wild Double-crested Cormorants on the Columbia River

 

The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (USACE) in its recent Draft Environmental Impact Statement submitted its plans to kill 16,000 to 18,000 wild double-crested cormorants, about half of the largest cormorant nesting group in North America. The colony is located on East Sand Island on the Oregon side of the Columbia River Estuary.

The double-crested cormorant, native to the Columbia River, is a black, fish-eating bird that stands about three feet high and sports a wingspan of about four feet. Weighing approximately four pounds, this bird eats about a pound of fish a day, or 25% of its body weight. They can be found on rivers, lakes, reservoirs, a variety of wetlands, in the interior, the Great Lakes, and on both North American coasts, where they range in their migration and nesting from Canada to Mexico and the Bahamas in the East and from Alaska to Baja in the West.

As fish hunters, cormorants are renowned for their diving prowess, chasing prey as deep as seventy feet in their pursuit dives. Biologists also recognize cormorants as dedicated parents, typically producing two to three viable fledglings from each of their usual four-egg clutches. Once reduced to near-extinction by DDT and other contaminants, cormorant numbers have increased steadily since the banning of these chemicals by the EPA in the early 1970s. In addition to their recovery from environmental toxins, as of 1972, double-crested cormorants were protected by federal law and international treaty under the Migratory Bird Treaty Act. Although seen as competitors and persecuted by fishermen for centuries, even their most stringent detractors admit that cormorants are  resourceful and clever birds that pose an array of challenges for wildlife managers.

On the West Coast's Columbia River Estuary, the USACE built, and now operates and maintains, the four most downstream dams of the river's fourteen hydroelectric facilities. The federal dams in total provide 40% of the electrical power consumed in the Northeast. The Corps therefore has an obvious stake, if not a conflict-of-interest in defending the damming of the Columbia and power industry policies against criticisms levied by conservation groups, biologists, naturalists, and individual citizens.

In the process of dam construction and operation, the Corps drastically reduced the runs of wild salmon and steelhead (salmonids), replaced their shallow-water spawning grounds with tremendously deep reservoirs, killed millions of young outmigrating juvenile salmonids in their turbines, polluted the waters with turbine lubricants, and basically created East Sand Island on the Oregon side of the Columbia River from the rubble and dredging deposits. Double-crested cormorants, along with Caspian terns and gulls, soon colonized this ideal island nesting ground situated squarely in the lower Columbia River Estuary, one of the richest fish-holding basins on the West Coast. Before long, the double-crested cormorants and terns, and particularly now the cormorant, through a haze of persecution and ignorance, became the most obvious culprit for the depletion of native salmon species, now on the Endangered Species List.

To disguise the damage to the salmonids caused by their dams, the Corps encouraged fish hatchery managers to flood the system with pellet-eating, "domesticated" salmon, which had many of their natural instincts bred out of them to facilitate hatchery cultivation and handling, as well as quelling protests from commercial fishermen. The combination of ideal nesting habitat and plentiful food supplies, including the "dumbed-down" 2.0-versions of salmon, allowed the cormorants to thrive and prosper and multiply to more than 30,000 nesting birds on East Sand Island, arguably the largest cormorant nesting colony in North America. And now, to protect the salmon initially threatened by installation of the Columbia River dams, the Army Corps of Engineers has chosen to blame and slaughter a large portion of the double-crested cormorant breeding stock on the West Coast to cover its tracks. In its proposal, the Corps minimizes, dismisses, or ignores the issues of commercial overfishing, the introduction of disease and the genetic pollution of wild fish stocks with weakened hatchery breeds, pollution from turbine lubricants  and other sources, climate change effects, spawning ground destruction, and numerous other factors.  

The 422-page draft impact statement filed by the USACE, available on the Corps' website under missions and current projects, offers action alternatives A through D, including (A), no action; (B), totally non-lethal measures; (C), repeated annual lethal culling coupled with some non-lethal measures; and (D), limited culling followed by non-lethal measures. The Corps naturally chose Alternative C, calling for the shooting of 20.3 percent (4,000 birds) of the East Sand Island double-crested cormorant population for each of four years for a total of just under 16,000 wild birds. It also calls for a subsequent culling period of two to three years to deal with new colonizing birds in order to keep the island population at 5,600 breeding pairs. The Corps claims that Alternative C is preferred because it carries the lowest dollar cost and offers the most effective lethal follow-up measures, while it dismisses non-lethal measures such as hazing and terrain modification as more costly and ineffective, possible causing cormorants to colonize other areas of the estuary (an unsubstantiated conclusion). In addition to presenting concerns,   speculations, and suppositions as evidence, in its draft environmental impact statement the Corps offers only superficial research with weak empirical data, which it applies selectively to make its points

The USACE has an obvious stake in perpetuating the myth of the cormorant as a gluttonous predator deserving little consideration. This attitude harks back to the era of purging  wolves and other predators from the environment to satisfy greedy hunters and ranchers, throwing predator-prey relationships out of balance, and causing huge spurts in the numbers of destructive rodents, rabbits, and foraging deer. Cormorants, as aquatic and marine predators, help to rid prey populations of diseased, crippled, and weaker individuals, ultimately strengthening prey species, and ultimately, the environment.

The Corps, as a relentless patron of commercial development, also has a huge conflict of interest as a direct stakeholder in the hydroelectric industry. Instead of striving to rebuild the salmon runs and spawning beds, reducing mortality from turbines on the Columbia's fourteen dams, reacting to overfishing, and protecting native salmon strains from genetic dilution by domesticated hatchery fish, the USACE, came up with the familiar misguided, self-serving solution typical of government agencies: kill the cormorants.

The U. S. Corps of Engineers must be called to answer for their cavalier attitude about slaughtering tens of thousands of protected wild birds.

In Love with the Horseshoe Crab

 

The Atlantic horseshoe crab, Limulus polyphemus in scientific terms, is a crustacean,  but not a crab at all. Its ancestry extends back 450 million years, long before dinosaurs showed their faces. Their primitive, sharp spiky appearance is thought by some people to be fearsome, but they are some of the gentlest creatures in the sea.

The horseshoe crab's brown exoskeleton is divided into the domed head hinged to the flattened abdomen, and linked to its pivoting spike-like tail, which it uses to right itself if flipped over by waves or other action. Females are about half again as large as males, who frequently clamp themselves to the females' abdomens to ensure successful mating, and are towed along in her daily activities.  Using their five pairs of legs, four of them clawed, they walk and swim in a graceful gliding motion along the sandy bottoms of warm-water bays searching out worms and small mollusks. Having many eyes, but poor eyesight, they frequently bump into the feet of shell collectors, waders, and barefooted fishermen, back off, and move along on a new path.

As a teenager snorkeling in the bays of Long Island I often came across horseshoe crabs and grasping them by the tail could feel their muscular body striving to set themselves right. Unlike feisty blue crabs that snip with their claws at the slightest provocation, the horseshoe crab's defense is to curl itself into a C-shape to protect its more delicate undersides – including the leafs of its book-like gills. When set back on the sand bottom they never retaliated, but instead glided away in its search for tender morels.  

In recent years the numbers of horseshoe crabs have dwindled due to their use by eel fishermen as chunk bait, the use of their blue blood in medical research resulting in as large as a 30% mortality and, of  course, habitat degradation. But at least in the last year I have observed more horseshoe crabs, particularly on Cape Cod, than in the past few.

Their harmless lifestyle has always attracted me to horseshoe crabs and I somehow hoped the feeling was mutual. Last spring I was fishing for schoolie striped bass in the sandy tidal creek behind First Encounter Beach on Cape Cod. The fish were sparse, as they had been for most of the season, but the weather was beautiful, and the gulls, and even an osprey, soared overhead in the brisk breeze. It was then I spotted a lone female horseshoe crab coasting through the shallows. Judging from the crop of algae and barnacles that carpeted her carapace this lady had combed the tidal stream for several seasons, and carried with her great horseshoe crab wisdom.

I stopped casting for a few moments to watch her prod along the shore and fade into the chalky deeper water. A few minutes later she made her second appearance, her identity confirmed by her definitive algae crop. This time I sensed a chemical, maybe even an emotional connection between us, which I took as a flirting effort on her part, after all, she was a timeless beauty. I responded by saying, "You are looking exceptionally ravishing this afternoon." She countered by flaunting everyone of her nine beautiful eyes and flashing a delightful smile. She then moved off into the incoming current and headed into the marsh.

It may all have been a product of my imagination, but the horseshoe crab, with its ancient ancestry and  graceful harmless lifestyle, deserves a chance to survive the upcoming decades, maybe a century, or a millennium, or even another hundred million years or so.  

 

The Horror of Killing Double-crested Cormorants for Entertainment

A recent article entitled "Exclusive: SC Hunters Kill More than 11,000 Cormorants" by Joey Holleman, published in The State, a South Carolina newspaper, tells some of the story of the state-sanctioned slaughter of wild cormorants, a migratory bird  supposedly protected by international treaty. Holleman reports that 11,653 cormorants were killed by hunters in a single month on Lake Marion and Lake Moultrie in South Carolina. Some individual shooters killed more than 200 birds. To form a mental image of the carnage, with each cormorant weighing about four pounds, readers should picture more than 22 tons of dead cormorants disposed of like so much trash.

What a disgrace.
 
These barbaric open-season hunts were organized by the state in its misinformed and politically motivated attack on double-crested cormorants to relieve the agency and fishermen of their contribution to the depletion of fish stocks in these two lakes.

It's always easier to blame the birds.
 
Although a revealing report leaning in favor of the cormorants, the article, most likely due to space limitations, tells only part of the cormorant story. Multiple peer-reviewed studies have shown that cormorants are opportunist feeders and prey on numerous species throughout the season, depending on their availability at any one time, and have minimal effects on overall fisheries, far less than overfishing and shoreline development. Also, there is absolutely no evidence that killing cormorants is a deterrent to other cormorants filling in the same niche behind the hunters, almost mandating a follow-up hunt the following year. The slaughter breeds only more slaughter and solves nothing.

Then there is also the idea that these shooters are hunters at all. In the modern sense, the word hunter conveys the idea of a sportsman pursuing quarry that promises some sort of challenge, indicating a respect for the quarry, thus elevating the shooting to a sport. These sanctioned culls of cormorants are nothing more than gunmen, not sportsmen, not hunters, but gunmen using wild birds for target practice with no rules and no limits in place. Culls in other areas show that many birds do not die immediately, but are crippled and left to die of their wounds or starvation, and in nesting areas leaving chicks to die of starvation, dehydration, or falling prey to predators. Where is the sport in any of this?

Shame on these so-called "hunters" and on South Carolina's Department of Natural Resources (DNR) for bowing to pressures, and trying to justify the use of a bogus political agenda to answer environmental and wildlife questions. Blaming cormorants instead of the DNR and fishermen taking responsibility for their own actions is no excuse for killing wild birds for the fun of it.

 

Cosmic Outlaws

In the mid-1950s Henry Beston, awestruck by the Great Beach on Cape Cod in Massachusetts spent a year, including a menacing winter, in his tiny Outermost House living on one of the greatest Atlantic beaches. Here he renewed his core beliefs concerning the elements of humanity.

This important quote comes from the foreword of the 1956 edition his book, he Outermost House:

“Nature is a part of our humanity, and without some awareness and experience of that divine mystery man ceases to be man. When the Pleiades and the wind in the grass are no longer part of the human spirit, a part of very flesh and bone, man becomes, as it were, a kind of cosmic outlaw, having neither a completeness and integrity of the animal nor the birthright of a true humanity.”


If we ignore nature our humanity ceases to exist.

Overhead, at night we can view the Pleiades, the brightest star cluster in the sky. The cluster is easily found by using the three stars in Orion’s belt as a pointer to the “thumb smudge” on the right, the Pleiades, visible to the naked eye, and easily examined in detail with binoculars. The 400 stars in the Pleiades, born about 20 million years ago, were never looked upon by the eye of a dinosaur, for the great beasts had disappeared for 35 million years, when these young nuclear furnaces took form. The point being that the beauty of the Pleiades is there for the looking. It is a vision that should not be left only for astronomers. It belongs to everyone. We only need to care enough to look up.

As to the wind in the grass, the pounding surf on the Great Beach, and the other simple measures of nature, it is our loss if we ignore them. Republicans would have us forget these simple, everyday delights in lieu of the fear of science jeopardizing their greedy agenda of commercial development with little regard for the environment and their fundamentalist cousins discounting the ancient age (really new arrivals, astronomically speaking) of the 400 stars in Pleiades to support their anti-science myth of a 6,000 year old universe. Are the Republicans and Christian fundamentalists then the cosmic outlaws of which Beston writes?

Beston tells us that beside nature being part of our humanity, humanity is part of nature. They are inseparable and we ignore their commonality at our own peril.

No Respect for Knowledge

It seems that our old friends, the creationists, the Christian fundamentalists, are up to their old tricks again. A recent New York Times article, Creationists on Texas panel for biology textbooks, told of how these reactionaries have again wangled their way into the process and business of selecting biology textbooks. These religious fanatics have hated and feared the concepts of the variation of species, natural selection, an ancient earth, and evolution in general, since the days of Darwin’s first edition of On the Origin of Species.

Their hatred of evolution and Darwin stems from their fundamentalist love of ignorance and myths. We could be as generous as they profess to be and call it a matter of faith, but creationists despise, and have such little respect for knowledge, that being generous assigns to them a gentler motive than their actions support, and as a result only encourages them to foster the world into darker times.

The fear they have of knowledge and science of course relates directly to their struggle to retain control over free-thinking minds threatening to challenge their domain. For a long time scientists quietly sat back, thinking how quaint creationists were, until they commandeered local school boards, and attacked and attempted to weaken rigorous scientific study with biblical myths in the guise of Intelligent Design.

There also came about a junction of religion and governance when the Republican Party and its presidential hopefuls choose to adopt the same ignorant fundamentalist notions. The real core of this union was reinforced when the idea of climate change was added to their shared menu of anti-science choices. The fundamentalist/politician alliance appears, at first, to be a nothing more than a mutual agreement to ignore decades, and in the case of evolution, more than a century of meticulous, painstaking study, exploration, and observation, without ever having to call up supernatural or divine intervention as an explanation. But it still is not all that simple.

What complicates the amalgamation of religion and politics is the common denial of science in general, and of evolution and climate change in particular. Like the peculiar union of the two groups, the connection between evolution and climate science is difficult to pin down – until we look at motives. The situation is similar to the logic sequences: if A then B, if B then C, therefore if A then C. Substitute the “facts of evolution” for A, “climate change evidence” for B, and “validity of science” for C. The last thing Christian fundamentalist and Republicans want to recognize is the validity of science. If either evolution or climate change is shown to be well-founded then they fear the the other may be shown to be equally well-founded, thus countering their myths and motives.

The trick is that each group, in a negative model of A-B-C, complements the other’s denial and dread. The fundamentalists fear evolutionary science challenging their myths (A), so they also question climate science (B), hoping to invalidate the scientific method (C). On the other hand, Republicans fear the EPA reacting to climate science (B) by implementing new regulations to protect the environment, so they also question evolution (A) to help invalidate the scientific method (C). And then both groups strike at science education and textbooks by diluting, eliminating, and distorting any science that challenges their myths.

Either path, the church- or the politically-driven, leads to planned ignorance and a modern version of the dark ages, in which knowledge is always seen as the culprit and in reality is always the true victim.       

Radical Environmentalists: Radical in Whose Mind?

In just about every other speech he makes, former Senator Rick Santorum, when he’s not proselytizing and driving his religious myths into the electoral process and attempting to erase the distinct line between church and state, cries foul at the “radical environmentalists” who fight and question what the oil, gas and coal companies are doing to our environment. He sneers as he utters the phrase “radical environmentalists” with the same intensity as when he decries Satan’s attack on, and infiltration of, America and American values. He conveniently forgets/ignores/ disregards/conceals the fact that he was a spokesman and defacto lobbyist for the coal industry after his failed attempt at reelection to the Senate in 2006. An online article published by Mother Jones  discusses how, after his defeat, Rick Santorum received $142,500 for fronting for Consol Energy, one of the largest coal mining companies in the country, which Santorum depicted as a local Pennsylvania mining concern. During his tenure in the Senate, Santorum also received more than $73,800 in donations from Consol at the same time the coal company lobbied Congress “on pollution limits, mine reclamation, worker health benefits, and tax policy” and the industry spent millions on its fictitious “clean coal” campaign. Paul Blumenthal’s Huffington Post piece, posted January 5, 2012, links Santorum, while still in office, to disgraced Republican Congressman Tom Delay, convicted lobbyist Jack Abramoff, and the Republican/Christian fundamentalist, anti-environmental lobbying efforts of the K Street Project.

Santorum never mentions any of these connections when he sneers his “radical environmentalist” taunts before his like-minded audiences.  After all, he is just a company man defending his livelihood.

Radical environmentalist is one of those skeletal, value-loaded phrases, without much meat attached to it. It reeks of panic and phobia. It also echoes the labels (and threats) put on a radical environmentalist from the 1960s who, in her book Silent Spring, identified the dangers of saturating our ecosystems and food chains with persistent insecticides. Chemical company executives, using scare tactics, claimed that Rachel Carson, a reserved marine biologist, wished to return to times of crops lost to great insect plagues resulting in national and worldwide famine. They referred to her as a fanatic in the cult of the balance of nature. Some (many) birds, fish, beneficial insects, and other wildlife species were poisoned and brought to the edge of extinction by disrupted reproductive cycles and pitiful chemical-induced birth defects. Entire ecosystems were in danger of destruction, but the millions of pounds of DDT applied to farmlands and forests and ultimately our lakes and rivers, in the name of national interest put fortunes into the pockets of chemical companies.

When did the American public hand over rights to the environment to corporations? Never is when. If Rachel Carson hadn’t spoken out how many species would be gone now and how many more waterways would be poisoned beyond reclamation? How many cancers? How many birth defects? Ask the chemical companies that ridiculed her findings in the face of repeated scientific conclusions.

Today’s “radical environmentalists” fight, among other things, Rick Santorums’s unfounded, anti-environmental, ant-science scare-tactic claims that environmentalists are destroying “clean coal” jobs and endangering our national interest, not to mention his paycheck. Sound familiar?

My book The Double-Crested Cormorant: Symbol of Ecological Conflict is now available in a  hardcover version at www.amazon.com, www.barnesandnoble.com and the University of Michigan Press, www.press.umich.edu which also offers an E-book edition. Also, check your local booksellers for availability.

For insights into the book, log on to my Author Page at Amazon at www.amazon.com/author/dennis-wild.

The Real Value of the "Getting Published" Process

A year or so ago I attended a writer’s conference in New York. I had looked forward to it for a few months and gone through the seminar schedule several times to make the most of my one day there, being careful not to miss the most interesting speakers.  The hotel was wall-to-wall writers, every one excited about the day, and for some the entire weekend. As I checked in, sat through the short orientation, and engaged some of the other attendees, I soon realized that few, if any of them, had ever been published, and fewer yet had any idea of how to go about getting published. They were there at the conference to work the process out in their heads.

The vast majority of the writers worked in fiction – historical, science, romance, horror, mystery, short stories, and novels.  I enjoyed hearing how other writers had chosen their specialties and how they had developed their characters and plot lines. As a nonfiction writer I was definitely in the minority, but I had anticipated as much from the catalogue of speakers and topics. Everyone chatted about their aspirations, but no one showed all their cards; there was certainly a sense of camaraderie, but we were also competitors. I came out, unintentionally, as the battle-scarred veteran with a book contract and publication date, even with the nonfiction tag.

During the lunch break, when I broached the subject of submissions and collections of rejection letters, faces around the table went blank. I sensed no one in my lunch group had ever submitted a manuscript.

 I also surprisingly heard several presenters, including the keynote speaker, discuss how simple, and uncomplicated a matter it was to get published.  This paradigm in no way matched my book or magazine writing experiences, but I was eager to hear of a different paradigm. And shortly out came the secret: self-publishing.

The myth of self-publishing is that it allows writers to see their words, ideas, and characters in print without facing the selective judgment of acquisition editors or the cruel strokes of the copyeditor. The myth of self-publishing also preaches the gospel of absolute control of authors over their words, content, copyright, format, marketing, and sales. The myth doesn’t have much to say about what is lost in by-passing the revision process, incurred costs, advertising campaigns, distribution, reviews, exposure to the know-how of experienced editors, and the fact that few booksellers, especially the chain stores, show little or no interest in self-published works.

One of the most irritating aspects of the self-publishing world is an examination of who promulgates the myth. The conference I spoke of was promoted and organized by Writer’s Digest, publisher of the magazine of the same name and a series of how-to writers’ guides. The same magazine advertises products and supplies without which writers cannot create or exist: coffee mugs, T-shirts, and baseball caps, all emblazoned with the label, “Writer.” The recent addition to Writer’s Digest’s catalogue of goodies is their entry into the world of self-publishing. Aside from the numerous revenue-producing ads inviting authors to publish their own creations, the magazine now offers its own book publishing services to writers. The process offers consulting, publishing, editing, and other services, all with fees attached. And conveniently, the number of articles in the magazine espousing the values and advantages of self-publishing over traditional publishing has markedly increased.

Writers put their efforts, thoughts, and hearts into their evolving manuscripts. In that pouring out of personal visions, promoting the idea that a mug or shirt will make better, more successful writer or will let others know they are writers, puts a smile on everyone’s face, writers included. No harm done. But when vulnerable writers are encouraged by a self-publishing company, which they otherwise consider a reliable source, to self-publish, one has to re-evaluate the integrity of the source.

Self-serving conflicts of interest must always be suspect. But the misrepresentation of self-publishing as a viable alternative to traditional publishing with comparable success, intentionally leads novice writers astray, diminishes their real chances of success, and ruins the priceless learning models discovered through re-writing and revision, probably the real value of the “getting published” process.