The Little Galloo Island illegal massacre of nearly a thousand double-crested cormorants on Lake Ontario in 1998 was quite a focal point in the management of these wild fish-eating birds. The shooters thought of it as a sort of protest – an act of civil disobedience – but with shotguns instead of with words, sit-ins, and placards. As it turned out, they were charter boat skippers and guides who felt the federal government had not paid enough attention to their misguided concerns about thousands of cormorants depleting the sport fish stocks, affecting their industry and incomes. What they failed to recognize and identify was the fact that every day, sometimes twice a day, they were filling hundreds of clients’ coolers with smallmouth bass, lake trout, and other game fish, reducing the available populations. Besides the overfishing, they also ignored the overdevelopment on shore, deforestation and resulting erosion, runoff, pollution, and general degradation of fish spawning sites in the lake’s tributaries.
Over time, fishermen, legislators, fisheries managers, and conservationists in many areas came to spoken, unspoken, and written agreements in the management of cormorants and population limits. There was a sort of a wink-and-a-nod peace.
But it seems that not all stakeholders in the controversy saw it that way, in that the sanctioned shooting of federally and internationally protected wild birds continues today, even though most scientific studies of what cormorants eat show that the birds have less effect on fish stocks than overfishing and the other factors mentioned earlier. The culls continue in states such as Ohio and Michigan where the US Fish and Wildlife Service has eased or nearly eliminated restrictions, evidence standards, and data requirements for proving cormorant damage to fisheries. It is just assumed to have taken place. After all, it is easier, and more politically practical, to shoot a few thousand cormorants to bolster mere perceptions than it is to conduct a study, or to adjust fishing seasons and bag and size limits to improve the fishing.
The real problem occurs when new cormorants move in, re-infiltrate the area, and replace the birds killed the previous season. Birds cannot count and have no recollection of who is absent from the year before. Then someone, a wildlife or fisheries manager or legislator, realizes the culls must continue season after season because there are about two million double-crested cormorants in North America. They are one persistent species and are not going away. Shooting is not the answer, because decision makers asked the wrong questions in the first place.
