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Overview
This is the story of the survival, recovery, astonishing success, and controversial status of the double-crested cormorant. After surviving near extinction driven by DDT and other contaminants from the 1940s through the early 1970s, the cormorant has made an unprecedented comeback from mere dozens to a population in the millions, bringing the bird again into direct conflict with humans. Hated for its colonial nesting behavior; the changes it brings to landscapes; and especially its competition with commercial and sports fishers, fisheries, and fish farmers throughout the Great Lakes and Mississippi Delta regions, the cormorant continues to be persecuted by various means, including the shotgun.
In The Double-Crested Cormorant, Dennis Wild brings together the biological, social, legal, and international aspects of the cormorant's world to give a complete and balanced view of one of the Great Lakes' and perhaps North America's most misunderstood species. In addition to taking a detailed look at the complex natural history of the cormorant, the book explores the implications of congressional acts and international treaties, the workings and philosophies of state and federal wildlife agencies, the unrelenting efforts of aquaculture and fishing interests to "cull" cormorant numbers to "acceptable" levels, and the reactions and visions of conservation groups. Wild examines both popular preconceptions about cormorants (what kinds of fish they eat and how much) and the effectiveness of ongoing efforts to control the cormorant population. Finally, the book delves into the question of climate and terrain changes, their consequences for cormorants, the new territories to which the birds must adapt, and the conflicts this species is likely to face going forward.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780472028122 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of Michigan Press |
| Publication date: | 02/08/2012 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 248 |
| File size: | 4 MB |
About the Author
Dennis Wild is the author of dozens of outdoor articles in publications such as American Angler, New England Game and Fish, Hudson Valley Magazine, and Nation's Best Sports Outdoor. He is a regular contributor for On the Water, for which he created an online fishing tips column. He holds a degree in zoology from the State University of New York at New Paltz and lives with his wife, Ellen, in the mid-Hudson Valley region of New York State.
Read an Excerpt
The Double-Crested Cormorant
Symbol of Ecological ConflictBy Dennis Wild
The University of Michigan Press
Copyright © 2012 University of MichiganAll right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-472-11763-5
Chapter One
Assault on Little Galloo IslandAn Act of Desperation
IN THE LONG RUN, 1998 was probably an average year, but it did have its own "firsts," its own records set, and its own claims to fame. In the world at large, Serbs and ethnic Albanians fought bloody battles in Kosovo; neighboring adversaries, India and Pakistan, detonated several nuclear devices in multiple tests; and three hundred million Europeans living in eleven countries agreed to deal in a single currency, the euro. In the United States, the House of Representatives impeached President Bill Clinton for lying about his affair with White House intern Monica Lewinsky and the New York Yankees claimed the World Series championship by defeating the San Diego Padres four games to zero. In theaters, the movie Titanic became the highest-grossing film ever, winning eleven Academy Awards. And on the small screen, seventy-six million American TV viewers watched the final episode of Seinfeld. Looking at the US economy in 1998, we paid just 32 cents for first-class stamps and $1.03 for a gallon of regular gas, while only 4.7 percent of us showed up in government unemployment statistics, less than half of what we counted in 2010. On a far, far smaller scale, the sport fishing boat trips and harvests on Lake Ontario plummeted for still another season. And a person or persons unknown illegally killed nearly a thousand federally protected double-crested cormorants on Little Galloo Island.
Besides the growing scarcity of game fish and fishermen, everything seemed the same as the previous year in New York's upstate village of Henderson Harbor on Lake Ontario. The same was true the year before that as well, with fewer recreational fishermen coming to town and apparently lighter weight fishing coolers being unloaded at the dock. Business owners looked at their "Beat Yesterday" sales ledgers and saw those black-ink figures shrinking. More and more often, daily and weekly figures were entered in red, indicating decreases, and owners soon reconsidered their summer payroll budgets. So not everything was the same. The fish were disappearing, and there were more of those "damn fish-eating cormorants" on Little Galloo than anyone in town could remember. The idea that maybe somebody should do something about that circulated throughout Henderson Harbor.
Not everyone within a modest radius of Little Galloo was happy about recent conditions on and about the island. Contentment was probably as far from what was in the minds of local residents as one could imagine. The fact that thousands of birds had taken a shine to summering on Little Galloo was not really the problem. Generally, most people like birds. But not these birds. These birds, double-crested cormorants, ate fish and lots of them. But birds that eat fish are not always considered a problem. Seagulls, for instance, feed regularly on fish and in some coastal areas they are not well-liked, but they are tolerated, because again, in general, most people like birds. The difficulty that arises with cormorants is that they often feed on the same fish as humans do, the same fish, in fact, that some humans, fishermen, pay other humans, charter boat captains, money to help catch them. Cormorants soon became the enemy, and enemies meant conflicts.
Charter boat fishing in eastern Lake Ontario wasn't just a business. It was the business. Henderson Harbor was a fishing village located just a few miles from Little Galloo's nesting cormorants. The village at one time proclaimed itself the "Home of the Black Bass" and had erected signs at entrances to the town certifying it. A species of black bass, the smallmouth bass, was one of the top fish sought by Lake Ontario anglers. Henderson Harbor continued to exist as a village and a political entity primarily due to the smallmouth bass and the sportfishing industry associated with it. Without the influx of fishing dollars spent on bait, tackle, and charters, and in the restaurants, taverns, marinas, and motels, Henderson Harbor would not be what it was: a fishing destination. Without the fish there would be no fishing, no fishermen, and no fishing dollars. Business owners would then have to cut their seasonal payrolls, thereby reducing the town's total disposable income for the season and the year.
It was said by the charter captains that the growing numbers of fish-eating cormorants on Little Galloo Island hunted and preyed on sizes of smallmouths up to twelve inches in length, the same length as New York State's legal minimum size limit for anglers. Humans and cormorants were fishing for the same fish, driving many fishermen to feel that, left unchecked, double-crested cormorants could severely damage their industry and their income.
Mitchell Franz was one of Henderson Harbor's many charter boat captains at the time. Working in a group with other captains and business owners, Franz repeatedly contacted officials of the US Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS or FWS), requesting help in the form of control measures for the growing numbers of cormorants. Franz reckoned that in 1980 the Little Galloo Island breeding cormorant population was about 200; by 1998 there were 9,800 pairs. The birds were doubling their numbers every three years. Casual observations of the birds told the story of their swelling population. Franz recounted how local cormorants were so numerous that the air was thick with them and how continuous flocks "flew past for an hour or longer to feed in the bay."
Captain Franz made the observation that between the late 1980s and the early 1990s, Lake Ontario was an "excellent fishery for smallmouth bass, steelhead, and brown trout." He believed that as the cormorant population grew the fishing declined and that the two changes were related. He told of how trout fingerlings were once "shore stocked" from tanker trucks and by the next day hundreds if not thousands of cormorants would show up and finish off the entire stocking. Franz added that the birds were eating over a million smallmouths a year and millions of yellow perch.
As a result of the declining sportfishing, Franz and other interested parties found themselves "going to a lot of meetings" but with nothing happening. Captain Franz felt that federal agency representatives showed up at meetings unprepared, different representatives each time, so there was little continuity and as a result a lot of time was wasted with "the feds." The local citizens group presented a request that two recommendations be implemented: (1) fund a study of cormorant diets to determine what fish they actually eat; and (2) make a determination of how many cormorants Little Galloo Island could support. Franz recalled that no action was taken on the recommendations. (Actually, New York State Department of Environmental Conservation biologists at the time were studying regurgitated double-crested cormorant "pellets" to learn what the birds ate.) Franz also said he was shocked when one USFWS official stated at a meeting that if the birds were eating as many fish as claimed by the fishermen, the USFWS needed to do something about the angler take, interpreted by the anglers to mean that the birds had more of a right to fish the lake than the fishermen did. In a published retelling of the encounter after the shooting, Franz remarked, "That's what loaded the gun." Again, in Franz's account, another response from "the feds" was that double-crested cormorants, as migratory birds, were specifically protected from lethal controls by international treaty. The captains were subsequently told by agency representatives that nothing could be done.
And of course there is the other side of the tale of these meetings. Diane Pence of the USFWS attended many of the meetings Franz refers to leading up to the Little Galloo incident, but her recollection is at odds with Franz's version. In a phone conservation, when asked if the captains were being listened to she responded, "That's a good question, but they were being listened to, but they didn't like what I had to say." Pence remarked that many times the general public and the recreational anglers misunderstood cormorants and were reluctant to change their opinions even in the face of evidence presented to them. Pence felt the meetings were not balanced in that they were attended by "one likeminded constituency. They were all anglers and charter boat captains." Missing were neutral parties such as independent conservation group representatives speaking to achieve a balance of opinions. Many meetings were attended by then congressman John McHugh, whose district included the town of Henderson and the village of Henderson Harbor. As a strong advocate of the fishermen, the congressman was known for powerful, anticormorant rhetoric, claiming that each four-pound cormorant ate several pounds of valuable fish every day, as opposed to the single pound they actually ate. It was said that McHugh and his staff likened the Little Galloo cormorant incident to a shot across the bow and a message to the Fish and Wildlife Service.
Both parties finished the series of meetings feeling that little had been accomplished. Peace was at risk. War was on the horizon.
As one fishing guide put it, "We've got no Kodak, no DuPont. You're either a fisherman or a farmer if you're going to live here." And the captains were no farmers. They were dyed-in-the-wool fishermen, resolved to protect their own interests against the threat, real or perceived, of cormorants ruining their livelihood.
The deadly challenge to the cormorants' secure nesting on Little Galloo came in late July of 1998. In the dark of the night five men set out from a marina in Henderson Harbor. As they boarded the boat they passed shotguns and ammunition over the gunwale and stowed them for the short run to Little Galloo Island. After what they felt was a long period of neglect and animosity by federal agencies, the five men had earlier decided to take action on their own. The captains believed the federal agencies that were supposed to protect their interests had failed them in favor of protecting the birds.
The boat soon nosed up to the darkened shore of Little Galloo Island. Three of the five men stepped ashore carrying twelve-gauge shotguns and sufficient shells to get the job done. The northern area of upstate New York is known for its duck and goose hunting in the fall, so guns, ammunition, and bird shooting were nothing new to these men. The two men remaining aboard backed the boat off the shore and circled the island. The island's nesting cormorants were still unaware of the terror to come that night.
On that same July day the seven or eight thousand pairs of breeding double-crested cormorants nesting on Little Galloo Island cared little for the price of gasoline, Oscars, or the President's affairs. They had settled on Little Galloo to raise their families.
Cormorants were not strangers to the Great Lakes. Regardless of the folklore tales and angler views, double-crested cormorants are native to America. For thousands of years they spent the warmer months on their breeding grounds on the rivers and lakes of the Midwest. And then in the early 1900s cormorants showed up on the more isolated islands of the Great Lakes basin, where they had probably also nested hundreds of years ago. In the media, among anglers, and among other interests focused on fish and fishing, cormorants were somehow considered and labeled foreign, exotic, and nonnative or even thought of as an invasive species. It's far easier to demonize an alien species and garner support in battling an invasive species perceived as ruining such a traditional enterprise as fishing than it is to produce sympathy for anglers competing with a truly American bird. To a large degree, the conflict is about publicity, and in fishing communities cormorants got nothing but bad press.
Archaeological and other records document pre-1900 nesting grounds along the shores of the Great Lakes and areas of the Midwest, in which cormorants were far more abundant than they are even today. Huge flocks of migrating double-crested cormorants were described in terms of square miles of sky. As early as 1926, flocks estimated at hundreds of thousands of individual birds moved north along the Mississippi River. With these numbers in mind it's difficult to accept the rationalization offered later by fishermen and others that an "overabundance" of cormorants today was causing an imbalance in the ecology when, in fact, modern double-crested populations represented actual declines from historic highs.
Use of the term overabundant is a value-laden judgment statement; it implies that cormorant numbers exceeded the biological carrying capacity of their food supplies. But, as we'll see in the upcoming discussion of Ashmole's Halo, it is the food supply at breeding sites that acts as a regulator of populations, allowing them to grow only as large as the local food supply can support. It can then be argued that these millions of birds thrived due to an existing ecological balance between their numbers and the fish on which they fed; otherwise there would be no possible expansion of the cormorant's population. It's therefore possible, in an absolute scenario, that humans, as fishermen, may be the intruder, the "invasive species" disrupting the stability of a balanced ecosystem, not the double-crested cormorant.
Regardless of how or when cormorants settled in the area, the massive feeding potential of the Great Lakes allowed the species to grow to its present-day levels. To many residents the huge and growing flocks of cormorants were still unwelcome foreign visitors. And through several peaks and plunges in their population, successful pairs of breeding cormorants came to colonize and virtually commandeer numerous Great Lakes islands. One such island was Little Galloo.
Sitting in the eastern basin of Lake Ontario, a few miles offshore from the fishing town of Henderson Harbor, Little Galloo, an unremarkable half-mile-long rock pile, was one of the most productive double-crested cormorant rookeries in the United States. In the summer of 1998, and in recent summers past, the island rookery was jammed with nests: gull and tern nests in the sand and the flat, bulky nests of doublecrested cormorants almost everywhere else. On the ground, among the weather-worn rocks, boulders, and few remaining grasses, cormorant nests pervaded Little Galloo's landscape. Even overhead, in tree limbs stripped bare of their leaves and twigs by the birds, cormorants wedged their nests into every available support strong enough to bear the weight of the nest, the two four-pound parents, and their chicks. Double-crested cormorants were also not opposed to building their nests atop the huge guano mounds that had accumulated for years beneath the dead nesting trees. In the birds' world they had come to reproduce the species' genes, not to fret about the housing situation on Little Galloo Island.
Cormorants had claimed much of Little Galloo as their own, but the island rookery was just part of the bird's story.
For a birder or naturalist, double-crested cormorants are not difficult to find. Often misidentified from a distance as ducks, loons, or even geese, they are seen flying at practical mid-heights or more commonly skimming the water's surface in straight-line formations, ragged-V wedges, or in large curved arcs. Unlike the identifiable quacks and honks of ducks and geese announcing their approach, cormorants, whose voice is a series of deep guttural grunts, choose a stealthier advance and remain silent when they fly. Another sighting might find cormorants paddling across the surface of the water, followed by the flurry of snappy dives in pursuit of prey. Or binocular optics might scan a cormorant popping to the surface while swallowing its new struggling catch head first.
Above the water, cormorants travel through the air, but compared to many other birds, the cormorant is considered only a moderately efficient flyer, meaning that flight consumes a great deal of the bird's hard-earned energy. Because of this, cormorants are apt to perch, roost, and nest close to their most productive feeding areas. So after hunting, it is not uncommon to spy clusters of cormorants perched on nearby pilings, buoys, boats, docks, or rocks, faced into the wind, with their wings extended in a spread-eagle position, drying them in a fair breeze. It's easy to see how, in the course of only an hour or so, cormorants might visit and face the challenges of each of their four environmental worlds: the air, the land, the water's surface, and its depths.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Double-Crested Cormorant by Dennis Wild Copyright © 2012 by University of Michigan . Excerpted by permission of The University of Michigan Press. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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