Cormorant hunt not based on science
Why kill a native species we're not even going to eat, asks Ted Cheskey.
Last winter, the Ontario government proposed an amendment to hunting laws to allow a massive slaughter of the double-crested cormorant, a native species. Details included year-round hunting, a “bag” limit of 50 per day, and no obligation to recover the carcass of a dead or injured bird. The original proposal was a parody of hunting, rather than a serious proposition.
Nature Canada was one of many reputable organizations that pushed back, rightfully categorizing the hunt as inhumane, misguided, lacking in scientific justification and outright dangerous.
The concept of culling cormorants does have supporters, notably the Ontario Federation of Anglers and Hunters. That said, it is hard to believe that the first proposal was anything more than testing the waters.
The government came back with a revised proposition that seems more reasonable, at least on the surface. For starters, the hunt is limited to the fall, which addresses a key concern about the inhumanity of killing birds at their nesting sites and high risk to other colonial species.
The government also decreased the daily bag limit to 15 cormorants. To compare with other hunted species in Ontario, the daily bag limit is six ducks, five geese, 10 rails (yes, rails can be hunted) and 15 mourning doves.
Finally, hunters must make every effort to collect killed or injured birds, and if they do not eat them, they must be disposed of in a sanitary way.
While the province is calling this a hunt, the question should be asked: Would anyone eat a cormorant? The interest in having the hunt is not from a culinary perspective. It is in part because some people hate cormorants and believe they are taking “their” fish. So why call it a hunt if you are not killing the birds for food? That creates an ethical dilemma for people who accept hunting if the object of the hunt is consumed.
The proposal lacks population targets that are the hallmark of waterfowl management in Canada and the United States, where bag limits are established based on targets to maintain healthy populations. No such objective is identified for the cormorant cull in Ontario. Without a population objective, the cull simply appears to be pandering to local interests. In other words, it is a decision based on politics rather than science.
The double-crested cormorant is a native, fish-eating species that was almost driven to extinction in much of Canada from blatant persecution that manifests itself in illegal shooting and assaults on their nesting colonies as well as the effects of DDT on its reproductive ability. Once DDT was banned in the early 1970s, double-crested cormorants mounted a remarkable recovery, not unlike the bald eagle, particularly in the Great Lakes Region.
Now widespread in the Great Lakes Region, double-crested cormorants nest in colonies along parts of the Ottawa and Rideau river systems, including islands on the Ottawa River near the Prince of Wales Bridge and Conroy Island in Gatineau. There is a large colony on Big Rideau Lake. Cormorants are migratory birds, leaving Eastern Ontario for the Atlantic Ocean in the fall, and returning in the spring.
Their numbers have responded to abundant populations of exotic, invasive fish species such as alewives and smelt. As a colonial nesting species that often chooses islands for colony sites where other colonial species such as gulls, terns and herons also nest, cormorants have been the object of hate and false narratives, such as that cormorants are not native species and that they destroy commercial and sport fish stocks.
What is really needed to address local concerns about cormorant populations and their effect on local fisheries is localized management, which could include organized culls as was done successfully for a decade on Middle Island in Lake Erie.
It can also be done successfully without shooting. The Toronto Region Conservation Authority has successfully and transparently implemented non-lethal cormorant control at Tommy Thompson Park for many years.
Such an approach would be far better than disguising the broad, provincewide cull as a hunt, which lacks scientific justification and objectives. Ted Cheskey, naturalist director at Nature Canada, a national non-profit conservation organization, leads their domestic and international bird conservation initiatives.