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.

 

Still Shooting After All These Years

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.