What are you people thinking…

What are you people thinking? 50 limit...there will be an indiscriminate slaughter. What do you gain by such a proposal? The cormorant was here many years ago prior to the wipe out by DDT. Let nature take its course. Fishing will improve not by exterminating cormorants but by limiting fishing till the stocks recover. Where is your science? Do you think we should hunt all species if for some reason someone determines there is an abundance? Do you recall the story of the passenger pigeon? Perhaps you could review that debacle. I am President of the Field Naturalists or Ontario and Michigan and all our thoughts will be forthcoming.
"anticipated levels of harvest aren’t expected to affect sustainability" - okay, well where's the data to back this up?
the hunts will occur during breeding season - let's say we ignore the damaging impacts that this could have on the overall cormorant population. Think about all the other colonial nesters that are often mixed right in with the cormorants. If someone hunts at a multi-species site, you're going to disrupt and potentially ruin the breeding success of many other species, such as Herring Gull, Ring-billed Gull, Black-crowned Night-Heron, Great Blue Heron, Great Egret, American White Pelican (a species at risk in Ontario), Common Tern, and Caspian Tern.
safety concerns - locally, our hunt would be mid-June through August. That's also our prime boating time. Here in the Desbarats area, there are many small rock island that host cormorants, but they're also along major boating routes. Obviously, duck hunting occurs on the water with no issues, but that's the fall when there's less boaters and hunters are usually more secluded in bays and uninhabited wetlands. I'm sure most cormorant hunters would take every precaution to be safe, but that may not be enough to settle the fears of nervous boaters as they pass by some cormorants. Maybe this isn't or won't really be an issue, but at least something to think about.
Bag limit is way too high - one dedicated anti-cormorant hunter could, on their own, put a real good dent in a local population. This might be harder to do in Southern Ontario, but up here, probably doable. Would be interesting to see how many people actually take advantage of this hunt though. I've definitely heard a lot of people around here say they wish they could go out and blast them.
is there really a way to police the bag limit? - the limit is set to 50 a day. What's to stop someone from taking their 50, going and dumping them, then going back for another 50? Obviously, many hunters like to follow the rules so I guess there's got to be some trust too. I also guess anglers could do the same thing, take their catches home and go back out again, and that is never brought up.
Call it a cull, not a hunt - since the dead cormorants will likely be allowed to spoil, that's exactly what everyone is going to do. They should at least call this a cull, not a hunt.
It is my understanding that scientific data rejects many common complaints , I'm told, by trusted sources, that there are many peer-reviewed, scientific studies that contradict many of the claims anglers make, such as their origin in Ontario, the amount and species that they eat, the damage they do, their population size, etc.
After acid rain destroyed many Killarney lakes - acid tolerant perch survived - when the lakes chemically recovered - lake trout fry were reintroduced - but were just eaten by the over population of perch - the solution was to put in adult trout to eat down the over population of perch so the young lake trout would not be eaten by excessive numbers of perch.

In Lake Nipissing where gamefish have been decimated by over harvest - would you not think bait fish populations have exploded - no wonder there are cormorants - but are cormorants natures way of removing bait fish so that the few remaining game fish can successfully reproduce - also have not read any papers on this.

There is a similar response to pelicans in NW Ont - over harvest of game fish = lots of bait fish = lots of cormorants and pelicans = fishermen blame the pelicans and cormorants for the crash of the game fish population.
Please reconsider this poorly planned proposals.

Ron Prickett President Sault Ste. Marie Field Naturalists