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.