|
Comorants are only a side effect of the overfishing done in the 80's.
These birds couldn't find food in the ocean and moved inland to fresh water ponds and lakes.....Freshwater ponds and lakes that are stocked with meal-sized trout every year, and easily caught by these birds when they are first introduced to the waters.
I knew of one pond that had a constant population of comorants that would just swim around and eat.
Now here's something to consider (Keep in mind these are NOT exact figures, but rather just speculative numbers)
If one bird eats just one fish a day, every day, from Easter until Thanksgiving, that's roughly 220 fish by one bird.
Multiply that by the number in a small rookery (25-30) and you have somewhere between 5,500 and 6,500 fish that are eaten just by one species of bird.
If that pond happens to be a trout stocked pond, that means the fish we helped pay for with our license are being used to feed the birds.
The pond I was talking about gets its fair share of stocked trout, but most of those are bird food.
So you can complain about the birds, and what they are doing to fisheries, but we can also blame the fishing industry for helping to create this problem in the first place.
Just adding my $0.02 worth.....
|