Cormorants have come a long…

Cormorants have come a long way since 1970 when they were being considered for future inclusion under the Endangered Species Act (Dept of Lands and Forests Fish and Wildlife Review, spring-summer issue, 1970). Environmental contamination certainly contributed to their decline earlier that century, as did the wanton persecution by sports and commercial fishermen who believed that cormorants affected their take.

While cormorants are indeed a concern, there needs to be an extreme caution in any hunting activity. Cormorants often nest in close proximity to other colonial nesting birds (e.g. Black-crowned Night-Herons, Great Egret) which are already in low numbers. Hunting of cormorants should not take place within a prescribed safe distance from any active heronry of such colonial nesting birds, especially during the spring as colonial birds are returning to their nesting site as well as until all the young of such colonial nesting birds have fledged.

While shotguns have advantages, for wildlife management purposes that this proposal is, why not consider small calibre rifles, .22 only, with short or long bullets which are quieter and do not carry as far as long rifle bullets and are therefore not as dangerous, but will still kill the cormorants without needing to be quite as close and without the noise level that shotgun blasts can do to so many other species, especially during the nesting season.

If there are likely to be thousands of cormorants killed, is there any way that the dead cormorants could be used by manufacturers of pet food for example? Perhaps not, but there needs to be a way of safely disposing of potentially thousands of cormorant carcasses, which left exposed will be an awful stench and attract scavengers.