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.

 

The Sandhill Crane: Tastes Like Pork

Double-crested cormorants faced the challenge of becoming “overabundant.” Their numbers were so low for so long that more than one human generation grew up never seeing large gatherings of cormorants, either at their northern breeding grounds or favorite southern wintering quarters. When cormorant numbers rebounded after DDT was finally banned in 1972, fishermen, politicians and even bird watchers were astonished at their numbers. And for some, even though cormorant populations were probably still below their historic highs, the bird’s large flocks were seen as “out of control” and the birds were eating too many fish. So they, meaning catfish farmers, fishermen, and government technicians, shot them – by the tens of thousands. The remains of the birds were usually composted onsite or elsewhere since the meat is inedible. A cruel, terrible waste of food chain energy and biomass.

Now it is the Sandhill Crane, Grus canadensis, that comes under the gun as an “out-of-control” species. After decades of conservation efforts in many locations to protect thinning numbers of rare sandhill cranes, threatened due to overhunting in the 1930s, conventional wisdom now turns to lethal measures to control a perceived overabundance. The evolutionary line of cranes goes back about 10 million years, with distinct sandhill crane ancestors appearing about 2.5 million years ago. Like cormorants, there are several subspecies of sandhills, but unlike cormorants some are rare or endangered.

Sandhill cranes, typically do not deal with fish in their diets, so they’re not in competition with fishermen or fish farmers. The cranes are basically opportunistic herbivores, living off whatever plants or seeds are available, so they can manage to find food in drier upland areas as well as shallow wetlands. Sandhill cranes dine on wild berries, seeds of many kinds, and when the possibility presents itself, small mammals, reptiles, amphibians, and invertebrates such as snails and insects. What actually brings them into conflict with man, farmers in particular, is their decided taste for cultivated foods such as corn and wheat. Sandhills frequently target recently planted corn and wheat fields, much like cormorants raid the densely stocked catfish ponds in the South in search of an easy meal.

To protect their fields, farmers in Wisconsin are requesting the creation of legal hunting seasons for sandhill cranes. More than a dozen states, with more in the offing, have established seasons, bag limits and takes for this once rare bird. Unlike cormorants, however, the flesh of sandhill cranes is edible and is reported by hunters to taste much like pork chops, so the birds are not merely killed, but also consumed.

Regardless of whether the carcasses are destined for the compost or the dinner table, it seems, at best, inefficient to spend decades reviving a rare, threatened species only to turn around and put it in hunters’ sights. What is really ignored here is the questioning of why the birds feed at agricultural sites rather than at open upland ranges or food-rich shallow wetlands. The one-word answer is habitat. Every day more and more open land is taken out of the natural food chain and converted from prairie or open range or upland habitat or wetland to real estate – development or reclamation projects, leaving wildlife without a natural home, driving it into conflict with humans.

In science fiction literature and physics thought experiments it’s common to postulate what happens when human subjects are locked in suspended animation and time goes on without them. When they awaken the world has changed and there is no place for them in the future. The return of nearly-extinct species sometimes falls into this type of scenario. There often comes a point when threatened wildlife species regain some of their original stature, attempt to re-colonize former territories and expand into new ones, but during the decades of their absence people forgot what they were, how plentiful their numbers had been, and their place in the ecosystem. In that future the returning wildlife has lost its claim to respectable habitat and moves into territory appropriated by humans in its absence, setting the stage once again for lethal control measures of “overabundant” species, even the ones that taste like pork.

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.  

Natural Cormorant Controls

One of the major issues I discuss in my book published by the University of Michigan Press, The Double-Crested Cormorant: Symbol of Ecological Conflict, is the role the southern catfish industry played in the extraordinary recovery of cormorant populations following the species’ near annihilation due to DDT.

The ban of DDT in the United States in 1972 promised a better future for Phalacrocorax auritus, the double-crested cormorant. Every year thereafter the birds would face lower burdens of the persistent insecticides in their food, eggs, offspring, and environment. What effectively was a booster shot to the cormorant recovery was the virtually simultaneous depletion of predators such as Atlantic salmon and lake trout in the Great Lakes due to overfishing and pollution. As the predators disappeared, populations of both native and non-native forage fish species, preferred food of cormorants, bloomed entirely out of proportion. The birds’ higher reproductive success rates coupled with massive schools of prey there for the taking at their breeding grounds drove cormorant numbers toward previous historic highs. One of the remaining population-controlling factors was the food sources at the cormorant’s southern wintering grounds.

At about the same time commercial fisheries crashed on the Great Lakes, southern row-crop farmers turned to the channel catfish as an alternate or supplemental crop. Catfish farmers never anticipated the fantastic growth in cormorant numbers, so gave little thought to protecting the heavily stocked catfish ponds from wintering cormorants. Thousand, perhaps tens of thousands of double-crested cormorants, fed all winter on the millions of unguarded catfish offered up by the growers. With rich plentiful food at both ends of their migration, cormorant numbers surged further – some local populations doubling in three years. Soaring bird numbers brought increased conflicts with Great Lakes fishermen and southern catfish producers resulting in cruel culling programs legally and illegally killing and wounding thousands of wild, federally protected cormorants.

The issue of the catfish industry affecting cormorant numbers should be taken into account when considering future lethal measures in cormorant management. Many catfish farmers facing huge increases in the cost of corn/soy catfish feed products closed some or all of their production ponds. Some were drained, plowed over, and restored to corn and soybean production. Other ponds were converted to the raising of largemouth bass, cultivated in less densely populated ponds, making them more difficult targets for P. auritus to attack. In either case, fewer catfish were available to hungry wintering cormorants, reducing the number of fatted, healthy birds prepared for the arduous migration north. From 2002 to 2011 every southern catfish-producing state experienced large decreases in acreage dedicated to channel catfish cultivation; overall acreage for U.S. catfish production shrank by 49% in those nine years.

This decrease in U.S. catfish production does not at all relate to the continuing, if not increasing, popularity of catfish fillets as table fare. In the seafood game, domestic farm-raised channel catfish products rank sixth in the United States. The gap in the U.S. between lower catfish production and increased consumption has been filled by foreign imports – particularly Pangasius catfish, farm-raised on the Mekong Delta of Vietnam. If the term Pangasius catfish doesn’t ring a bell it’s because domestic catfish producers lobbied U.S. government agencies to prevent importers from calling this product “catfish.” In American stores it is marketed as Basa fish or bocourti, also two unfamiliar names.

On top of cormorant predation, high production costs, low market prices, and foreign competition, American catfish producers faced another opponent with uncontrollable parameters – nature and the epic floods of 2011. Catfish farms along the Mississippi River Delta faced storm-driven waters which flooded roads, reduced feed supplies, topped their catfish pond levies, released their fish stock into the wild, and in some cases flooded their buildings. The damages and loss of production are yet to be tabulated, but surely what it means is, temporarily at least, catfish farming and production will be reduced even further.

So, all in all, what does this have to do with brutal, bloody sanctioned cormorant kills? Double-crested cormorants have little taste for corn or soybeans. They’re not grain-eating crows or geese; cormorants eat fish and have a predilection for catfish, particularly the penned-up, farm-raised variety. Fewer ponds produce fewer catfish – less winter chow for cormorants. The birds will have to return to foraging the Mississippi River and its tributaries for wild bluegills, perch, and wild channel catfish. And the whole package taken together means fewer healthy cormorants producing fewer healthy offspring.

Since the availability of food is a major limiting force for the expansion or contraction of wildlife populations an alternative then to government contract technicians killing tens of thousands of wild birds might be to let nature simply take its course. The birds wintering in the delta migrate from the northeast and mid-west so anything that places limits on their numbers in the South will send fewer cormorants to their traditional northern breeding grounds and cormorant populations may find newer, reduced numbers, naturally. And maybe the rifles and shotguns can be put away – at least for a while.

My book The Double-Crested Cormorant: Symbol of Ecological Conflict is now available in a trade hardcover version at Amazon.com, Barnes and Noble.com, and the University of Michigan Press, http://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 www.amazon.com/author/dennis-wild .

Parallel Overabundance: Snow Geese and Double-crested Cormorants

My previous blog discussed the relative meanings of the term “overabundance” to various stakeholder groups and touched on what was happening with snow goose populations in North America. What is amazing and what I will show is how nature repeats itself and wildlife management falls into the same repeated traps.

The double-crested cormorant, Phalacrocorax auritus, the main topic of my blog site, survived the onslaught of DDT to come back into the environment after the EPA courageously banned unregulated uses and production of the bioaccumulated insecticide. Cormorants also thrived after they were finally included in later provisions of the Migratory Bird Treaty Act (MBTA), protecting nearly all wild birds from unlimited shooting and feather hunters. In addition to these birds encountering cleaner water and less-toxic prey fish, on the Great Lakes where they breed in the summer, they found fantastically increased food supplies of forage fish because natural predators such as lake trout, Atlantic salmon, and others disappeared due to overfishing and pollution. At about the same time, on their wintering grounds, cormorants stumbled on and exploited a new food source in the form of farmed catfish in the South’s Mississippi Delta region. All this free-for-the-asking food at both ends of their range allowed double-crested cormorants to produce larger numbers of healthier, stronger youngsters and to stay fit and vigorous over the course of the winter for the return flight north.

The snow goose, Chen caerulescens, is a medium-sized white goose that breeds in summer arctic tundra regions in Canada, Alaska, and Russia, and migrates south in a number of fixed flyways. This goose also has a blue version that was once thought of as a different species, but proved to be merely a “morph” of the more common white form. The snow goose suffered from unrestricted hunting, reducing its numbers to about 5,000 until it was protected by the MBTA early in the twentieth century. When their numbers increased to what federal wildlife managers considered acceptable levels hunting seasons were established in 1973.What happened after that closely parallels the progression of cormorant populations.

During their southern migration snow geese once settled on marshes on both coasts to feed on the grasses and their tuberous roots. Much of that is in the past now since many of the coastal marshes are gone or greatly reduced due to commercial and residential development and urban expansion. Ordinarily, as food supplies decrease, so does the wildlife population dependent on that food. The expected decline in snow goose numbers never materialized. What happened? Humans intentionally created an alternate food source: flooded rice fields. Flooding prepares the fields to receive the next planting while at the same time provides aquatic forage for thousands of migrating snow geese. The flooded fields in fact filled with so many birds that the thousands of snow-white birds became an attraction for birdwatchers, naturalists, and the just plain curious. And not unlike the convenience of unguarded catfish ponds in the delta that supported tens of thousands of cormorants, the rice fields bolstered snow goose numbers on both coasts. More food, more birds.

Then there’s the arctic breeding ground. It is postulated that warming climates and higher tundra temperatures created improved breeding conditions resulting in more, stronger, healthier chicks ready for the rigors of a long migration. Better breeding, better birds.

The result of all this improved feeding and breeding is the proclaimed “overabundance” of snow geese. The negative effect is that the geese are literally and figuratively eating themselves out of house and home. Their dining practices of tearing grasses from the ground or marsh bottoms kills the plants, weakens the tundra substrates and increases erosion, allowing ocean tides deeper access into the marshes, virtually drowning them.

The great snow goose flocks have also crowded and pillaged the rice fields making them difficult for growers to manage and have become pests to northern farmers when they descend on corn and grain fields like falling snow, as their common name suggests.  

How do wildlife managers control the bird’s numbers? Not an easy question to answer. Several states, including New York, with the help of more flexible federal regulations, have expanded their legal hunting seasons and daily bag limits for snow geese. The problem arises that killing and dressing twenty-five geese a day quickly fills the family freezer. With about a million snow geese using the Atlantic flyway and another three million or so settling in the Rocky Mountain states, plus huge numbers in the other flyways, killing tens or even hundreds of thousands of geese may slow, but not curtail the growth in snow geese numbers. Managers faced some of the same problems in trying to reduce the two million cormorants in North America, but in the case of those birds, they are inedible, so hunting seasons to put meat on the table were never seriously considered.

One measure that was applied to reduce cormorants was the cull, in which paid “technicians” armed with suppressed (silenced) weapons brutally shot thousands of birds, often leaving wounded adults and starving chicks in their wake. The carcasses were then buried or somehow composted. All that violence to reduce cormorant numbers by mere fractions of one percent. And now, with the failure of the expanded hunting seasons, the use of snow goose culling programs is being considered, but again, with the taste for snow goose dinners waning, the slaughtered birds will probably be destined for ignoble composting.

What is the alternate solution to massacring wild birds? Just as the cause of their growth in numbers had multiple roots, the answer to snow goose “overabundance” has multiple remedies. The first of course is to do nothing. If the geese are making their breeding grounds less habitable then it’s reasonable to assume that recruitment (new individuals added to the population) will fall and the species’ reproductive capacity will reach a new reduced level. Another choice is to somehow separate the geese from their food sources during migration. Rice farmers need not flood their fields to the same extent to kill off old growth after the grain harvest. At one time growers burned their fields, but faced criticism for the added air pollution. They then decided to flood the fields instead, and to justify the use of such massive quantities of water and come down on the side of the good guys, flooded adjacent fields to provide additional habitat for migrating snow geese.

So, as the converse to “more food, more birds” and “better breeding, better birds,” wildlife managers can encourage efforts to reduce the food available in the rice fields and let the geese temporarily reduce the productivity of their own breeding grounds.

That way we can tell the “technicians” to put the guns down, stay home, and take the day off.

To respond or make a comment click "comment" below or contact me at denniswild@earthlink.net . 

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.

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.