Ontario looks to make cormorant a ‘game bird’
Once near extinction, bird’s population has flown sky-high since ’70s
It will soon be open season on the double-crested cormorant, a bird once near extinction that has rebounded and is now seen by some as a nuisance because of its appetite and toxic guano. The Ontario government is proposing to list it as a “game bird” to help manage its numbers.
“This is about population control. The population of cormorants has exploded since the early 1970s,” Natural Resources Minister John Yakabuski said on Thursday. “Through the last number of years, the Ontario Federation of Anglers and Hunters, commercial fisheries, and fishers and hunters all over the province have looked at this and said, ‘We need to do something about this,’ ” Yakabuski said.
Cormorants eat more than one million kilograms of fish each year in the Kingston basin alone, where there are eight known colonies of the birds, he added. “So the damage that it does is quite extensive — not only to the fish stocks, but also to the land itself.”
To that end, Queen’s Park will be consulting with the public for the next six weeks with an eye toward allowing the birds to be hunted from March 15 to Dec. 31 each year. Hunters would be permitted to each kill up to 50 cormorants a day, but would be responsible for their disposal, since they are practically inedible.
Gail Fraser, a biology professor at York University and an expert on cormorants, warned there could be collateral damage from such a cull.
“An open season on the cormorant is an open season on the loon,” said Fraser, noting the two birds are commonly confused as they glide majestically across the water.
“Fifty a day is a lot. Essentially, it’s game wastage,” she said, pointing out hunters will throw out their quarry instead of eating it. Fraser said with the current rebound of the bald eagle, a main predator, cormorants are not the pest some claim. “People think they eat a lot of fish, but the science behind that is complicated. Most of the studies on that are actually quite ambiguous and don’t really show an effect,” she said.
According to the federal Canadian Wildlife Service, a cormorant’s diet consists of less than 2 per cent of fish that anglers and commercial fisheries want, such as salmon. The birds prey on minnows, small carp and alewives, but their smelly excrement is harmful to the vegetation around the trees in which they nest. They are blamed for causing environmental damage to the province’s ecologically sensitive areas.
Between the 1950s and early 1970s, the cormorant population dwindled due to the use of toxins, but environmental improvements have led to a population boom.