Dear Editor:
Two recent articles about cormorants prompt this letter. Both give one individual’s view on the effect of these birds on fish populations.
Certainly these birds eat some walleye, bass and maybe even some trout. But so what? This is only a problem if you view the fish population in a lake as your own private property.
Realistically, we should view ourselves (local fishermen, tourists and commercial fishermen) as one of the many different predators that consume fish from our lakes. Many other species depend on the “game fish” for their long-term existence, too.
It is the height of human arrogance to claim them for ourselves and to label cormorants as undesirable competitors. We are, without question, the most effective and deadly fishers on our lakes. Depletion of fish stocks started before the arrival of cormorants and pelicans. It started with local, tourist and commercial harvest of the fish stocks and it is still the human fishers who take the majority of the fish in our lakes.
An extreme example of “preserving walleye stocks” by predator control would include the deliberate killing of all northern pike, loons, mergansers, cormorants and probably several other species that I have overlooked. The consequences of such a slaughter are too unpredictable and would you want to live in a world where such indiscriminate killing takes place?
I really hope we are not about to slip into the “bad old day” mentality of predator control that saw such nonsense as shooting eagles, hawks and other predatory birds so that small game populations would be left for human hunters. Ecosystems are too delicate for us to engage in such self-important foolishness without doing serious unanticipated damage.
History provides many examples of predator control having disastrous and unanticipated consequences. If all this sounds a bit too much like “David Suzuki environmentalism” please be assured that I am one of the keenest hunters and fishermen in the area and I do not hesitate to take my legal harvest of fish and game. I am just not greedy or foolish enough to care if a few birds eat some fish that I would also like to eat.
Too much emphasis has been put on what these birds eat. Has anyone asked why they have moved into this area with such abundance? Could it be global warming, a process driven entirely by human activity, that has led to an extension of their breeding range? Could it be, that too many people remove predatory fish from these lakes and therefore leave the much more abundant baitfish in shallower water as food for both cormorants and pelicans?
Before we try to control these birds we should know why they are here. What they eat is of little importance until we know why they are here now.
In direct rebuttal to Mr. Baranowski’s article, I would like to point out that the Brown pelican, found only in the Caribbean, is a diving bird but the local White pelican “dips” or “scoops” fish as it swims and can therefore only affect the top two feet of water. How many walleye have you caught in less than two feet of water Mr. Baranowski? Probably about the same as me, which is less than a handful in a lifetime. So let us take the pelicans out of this discussion.
In response to Lyle Armstrong who is concerned about water quality and the smell, I am sorry but I have no short-term solution. But you will probably have long-term relief. Introductions of foreign species or invasive migrations have a way of peaking their populations within a few years of their arrival and then finally falling to a stable level which will be surely less than what you are experiencing now.
John Nelson