Why are cormorants in the crosshairs of Queen’s Park?

The cormorant is in the Ontario government’s gun sights again. When will this magnificent bird get a break?

This time, the Progressive Conservative government wants to declare the doublecrested cormorant a game bird. That means it could legally be hunted and killed.

But there is a big difference. Unlike other game birds, the cormorant would not be killed for food. It is almost inedible.

Also, unlike other game birds, dead cormorants could be left to spoil. The only constraint is that hunters would be obligated to eventually dispose of the rotting carcasses.

Anyone with a valid licence would be able to shoot and kill up to 50 cormorants a day from March 15 to Dec. 31. That’s a limit of 13,750 birds per year for each hunter.

Hunters would be allowed to fire from stationary motorboats into the cormorant flocks that wheel across the Great Lakes.

All in all, the government’s proposal is reminiscent of the way that early North American settlers dealt with the great flocks of passenger pigeons that once darkened the skies. They wiped that bird out.

The aim, according to information posted on the Ministry of Natural Resources and Forestry website, is to respond to complaints from commercial fishermen and others.

Commercial fishermen have never liked the cormorant. They see it as a competitor because it eats fish.

Others in the anti-cormorant camp object to the way the birds live. Like great blue herons, they tend to roost in trees. Their droppings smell and can kill the trees in which they nest.

Yet many of the claims against the cormorant are exaggerated. True, they do eat a lot of fish. But according to a report from the federal government’s Canadian Wildlife Service, they eat mainly fish that are of no interest to humans, such as alewife.

Studies show that commercially valuable species such as trout and salmon account for less than two per cent of a typical cormorant’s diet. Prey fish, the species upon which salmon and trout depend, account for even less.

And while cormorants may seem more visible on the Great Lakes, the natural resources ministry notes that population levels have stabilized or slightly declined.

That the cormorant exists at all in the Great Lakes is a minor miracle. Herbicides, such as DDT, almost wiped the species out in the 1970s. In 1973, according to the Canadian Wildlife Service, only 125 nesting pairs remained in the region, including 10 in Lake Ontario.

The ban on contaminants, such as DDT, came just in time to give. The species’ population exploded exponentially, before levelling off in the first decade of the 21st century.

At first, the cormorant’s rebirth was heralded as an environmental success story. In 2005, then Toronto mayor David Miller declared April 12 Cormorant Day in honour of what he called these “amazing and magnificent birds.”

But the cormorant always had its enemies. In 1946, at the urging of commercial fishermen, the Ontario government began a deliberate program of searching out and destroying cormorant eggs.

In 2004 and 2005, Dalton McGuinty’s Liberal government authorized gunmen to shoot cormorants nesting in two small islands that are part of a provincial park near Trenton. Some 11,000 birds were killed in what the government said was an attempt to protect the environment.

In 2016, a Conservative MPP’s private member’s bill, which would have put cormorants on a shoot-to-kill list, almost made it through the legislature.

Now we have the game-bird gambit. The natural resources ministry predicts the measure would have a neutral impact on both the environment and the economy — that it won’t help or hinder either.

That, in turn, raises an obvious question: Why do it? What’s this bird done to us to deserve such slaughter?

Twitter: @tomwalkom