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More than 4,500 cormorants killed
Spiel -- Fri, Jun/4/04
By Ben Medd
Wednesday, June 02, 2004 - 10:00
Local News - BRIGHTON — The first cormorant chick could hatch on High Bluff Island by as early as tomorrow, ending an effort by Presqu’ile Provincial Park employees to shoot half the adult birds on the island.
The park staff had been ordered to shoot 6,000 double-crested cormorants on the island in an attempt to prevent the out of control population from turning an already at risk forest into little more than bare rock.
Provincial park superintendent Tom Mates told The Intelligencer that despite the possibility of the cull being called off by as early as Thursday, he believed park staff is well on its way to reaching its goal.
“We are getting close to our target number of 6,000 cormorants,” he said on Tuesday. “We are at 4,592 right now and we will stop as soon as we see chicks.”
Despite the tight and unpredictable timeframe, Mates said he saw little need to increase the number of staff he has been using to shoot birds on the island.
It has taken provincial park staff 11 days of shooting to kill the nearly 4,600 birds, an average of just more than 417 birds per day. If the cull continued at this rate, it would take roughly three-and-a-half days to kill the remaining birds.
The announcement of the Ministry of Natural Resources plan to kill-off half of the 12,000 nesting cormorants on High Bluff Island sparked an outcry from environmentalists who demanded Environment Minister Leona Dombrowsky conduct a full review of the project. Dombrowsky later gave the MNR the green light to begin shooting the birds, with the stipulation that the project be scrutinized after its completion.
This did not satisfy those opposed to the cull, however, as the Northumberland OPP was called in to deal with a number of protesters who had been appearing at the park.
“There have been protesters here,” Mates said. “One day there were five and the other day there were two. They were outside the park and on park property.”
While there has been opposition to the cull, countless Brighton area residents and fishermen have voiced support for the project, many criticizing the ministry for not killing off more of the birds.
Glen Quick, the 61-year-old owner of Quick Fisheries in Gosport, said the cormorants were the main reason a ‘for sale’ sign currently sits outside his family business.
Quick said the tens of thousands of nearby nesting cormorants have decimated the local fishery, forcing many commercial fishermen off the water and putting him out of business. Yellow perch, the main staple in the area’s commercial fishery, are also a favourite snack of the cormorants, each of which eat on average a pound of fish per day.
“A lot of guys have pulled their nets up because the cormorants have eaten so much there is not any amount of yellow perch left,” Quick said. “The cormorant has devastated the yellow perch. Everything has gone down, including walleye, because they eat little walleye too.”
It was only a few years ago that Quick said he remembered there being between 15 and 20 commercial fishing boats running out of the Brighton area. The number has since dropped to nil, Quick said.
Bill Rudland, who has operated the Harbourview Motel and Marina in Gosport for the past 13 years, tells a similar story of a dwindling fishery.
“I would say a good 50 per cent of the business, at one time, in the motel were the salmon charters,” Rudland said, as he scooped weeds out from around his dock. “Last year I only had one salmon charter stay here because there are no little fish for the salmon to eat. Basically the salmon sport fishing here has been killed.”
Rudland, like many of the residents of Gosport, knows all too well the familiar sight of what locals refer to as the ‘black clouds’ of hungry cormorants. The birds, which fly together in huge flocks, drop in and out of the water in unison, creating a massive moving fish net.
At first alarmed by how often the birds would roll through the bay in this thick formation, eating their fill of little smaller fish as they went, Rudland said he is more concerned this sight has become a rarity.
“Four or five years ago you could come down here and it looked just like a big rolling black cloud,” he said of the cormorant feeding pattern. “There are no fish left for the cormorants to come back for here, now. They have fished the bay out. You don’t see them like you used to.”
Carl Puffer, who has been fishing in the bay for the past 21 years, said he has seen the fishing go from plentiful to pitiful in recent years.
“You used to go out and drop your line in and you would be catching perch left, right and centre as soon anywhere in the bay,” he said. “Now you really have to pick your area to catch anything. They are doing really big damage to the perch.”
Over at Presqu’ile, Mates said he has heard the complaints about the impact cormorants are having on the fishery, but said those concerns have little to do with the cull.
For Mates, the one and only goal of the cull is to keep High Bluff Island from suffering a similar fate as that of nearby Gull Island. Using an aerial photo taken of both the islands in 1997, Mates illustrated what he calls the need for a cull. He pointed out the healthy covering of vegetation and trees which could be seen covering Gull Island seven years ago, comparing it to the island’s current surface of bare rock, now covered only by hundreds of birds and their droppings.
If the park’s current population of 12,000 pairs of nesting cormorants, which started with a single nesting pair in 1980, were not reduced, Mates maintains the same fate would await High Bluff Island.
Mates said that while the cormorant’s droppings are highly acidic, it is because of the sheer amount of the excrement and salt content of the droppings that the trees are dying. When the cormorants nest up in the trees, Mates said their droppings coat the leaves, preventing the tree from performing photosynthesis. The salty excrement also lands on the ground, pulling moisture out of the already weakened tree, eventually leaving only a dead and dried stump in its place. With the current population of cormorants nesting in the treetops of the island, Mates said a substantial amount of damage could be done to the trees of High Bluff.
“When you look at 12,000 nests that average two chicks per nest, you have 48,000 to 50,000 cormorants that are sitting in the tops of the trees, excreting a lot of times during the day and killing the trees,” he said. “Cormorants do nest on the ground, but we are not concerned about that, we are concerned about the trees. We are trying to reduce the tree nesters because it is that part of the cormorant population that are destroying the trees.”
One cormorant from every pair of tree nesting birds is being targeted in the cull, the carcasses from which are being composted in a large pile on the island. Mates said the composting should not take long, as he checked the pile on Monday and found those birds killed early on in the cull had already been reduced to little more than bones.
The dead cormorants are also being used to conduct a number of studies, Mates said.
“We are taking samples of their blood to have that analyzed. We are looking for avian influenza,” he said. “Avian influenza is really nonexistent here, which is why they want to check these birds. It is a good opportunity to get these birds and see if there is a presence of it. The possibility of it is very small, but the more information we can collect, the better informed we are.”
The blood tests will also focus on any presence of Newcastle disease, which is a neurological disease which can leave the birds unable to fly. Park staff witnessed an outbreak of Newcastle disease among birds on the island back in 1995, but have not since spotted signs of the disease.
Mates said he is confident the cull, which began on May 6, will help to protect the islands trees and plants, but said he was uncertain whether the cormorants killed on the island this year could be replaced by cormorant colonies on nearby islands
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