Overabundant?

One of the value-laden terms applied to the double-crested cormorant is “overabundant.”  It carries a weight to it that is so subjective as to be meaningless. To whom are they overabundant? Commercial and sport fishermen? Southern catfish farmers? Bird watchers? Politicians? Conservationists? Environmentalists?

Each of these groups has their own ideas of how many is a scarcity, how many is enough, and how many constitutes too many.

·        Fishermen see breeding cormorant populations as a threat larger than overfishing, pollution and overdevelopment so a lot of cormorants are too many because the fish belong to fishermen. Simple, uncomplicated logic.

·        Catfish farmers stocking unprotected ponds with tens of thousands of fingerlings consider all cormorants, in any number, a threat to their business and none is a better population than any other.

·        To bird watchers and enthusiasts there rarely is a bird population that is too large to their liking. Birds to them are the sign of a healthy ecosystem, and greater populations signify greater natural production and protection of the outdoors.

·        Politicians look for easy ways out of delicate situations so it’s easier to blame an “overabundant” species for declines in fish stocks than it is to fault their own environmental inaction and support of rampant development  and overfishing, generating greater and greater challenges to wild fish populations.

·        Conservationists and environmentalists attempt to manage cormorant and other wildlife populations to ideal numbers determined by a jumble of input information from all the other stakeholders, sometimes reflecting economic interests over true conservation goals.

So the terms “scarce,” “abundant,” and “overabundant” reflect how individuals and groups of like-minded individuals see species populations, and their fluctuations, such as in the case of the double-crested cormorant, as positive or negative trends.

Another bird species, the snow goose, is also coming under increased pressure due to its overabundance, its phenomenal population growth rate created by management practices that failed to acknowledge and react to changing environmental and agricultural conditions until it was too late. Like the cormorant they can't seem to kill enough of them. I’ll look at this in my next blog.

To respond or comment click "comments" below or contact Dennis Wild at denniswild@earthlink.net.

Double-crested Cormorants: Perceived as Invaders

Much of the conflict between cormorants and humans on the Great Lakes stems from the mistaken assumption by many people that the cormorant is a non-native intruder to the area.  Cormorants historically had a presence on the lakes in numbers that may have even exceeded the numbers we see there today. Even as late as the mid-1950s many double-crested cormorants nested on Great Lakes islands. As the effects of persecution and DDT progressed, cormorant numbers declined sharply. And as cormorants declined for several decades, human collective memory of their presence and nesting colonies declined as well. Generations of Great Lakes commercial, charter, and recreational fishermen simply forgot about cormorants and the role they had played in the lakes environment.

The EPA banned DDT in 1972, giving double-crested cormorants an appeal from extinction as their thin-shelled eggs again became viable. Feeding primarily on the plentiful alewives and round gobies, the true invasive species, cormorant numbers increased exponentially. New generations of fishermen, unfamiliar with the cormorant’s history on the lakes, considered re-colonizing cormorants exotic thieves stealing what belonged to them alone -- the fish. To anglers the situation was intolerable. The guns came out, cocked and ready to fire.