Go get em Uncle Sam

[Nebe]

Oregon is going to cull the cormerant population! A good start. I'm certain that the winter flounder populations in New England has been wiped out thanks to these birds. I'd pull out my 12 gauge for this cause. Seals should be nervous as well. Maybe they will be next?


http://news.nationalgeographic.com/n...s-environment/

[JohnR]

Seal,s - never gonna happen - too cute.

[FishermanTim]

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.....

[Raven]

good logic....

[ivanputski]

My fathers blood boils when he sees a cormorant.
Posted from my iPhone/Mobile device

[FishermanTim]

Originally Posted by ivanputski

My fathers blood boils when he sees a cormorant.
Posted from my iPhone/Mobile device

Mine used to when they started their trout rampages in the late 80's and into the 90's, and then when I thought about why they had moved inland, it made me a little more understanding of the flexability of a bird that was able to change its feeding behavior from a ocean-based to an inland-based environment.

Oh, don't get me wrong...they still suck eggs big time, but they have proven that they can take a lickin' and keep on pickin'!!!

(There's been comorant culls done before, and with modeate to little success in controling their numbers. You knock down the numbers at one rookery and they will move in from another to take over.)

Why can't they do something about the damn geese populations?
Sure, comorants eat fish and have an effect on the fish populations, but geese have a larger effect on the entire ecosystem, both on land and in the water!

Let me know when they have a goose culling drive, and I'll help bag what's left after they've been blasted!

[Liv2Fish]

I bet they eat more than that. Back when I used to drift chunks in the canal, I had a cormorant the would not leave my bait alone. I fed the thing 10 mackerel heads and it was still trying to get every cast. I had to throw rocks at it to get it to move on but it was too full to fly and basically swam off in a hurry.

[piemma]

Back when there was a good buckeye run at Nonquit in Tiverton, the dam at Nonquit Pond would be covered along with the pond and the stream. Just 1000s of cormorants.

[ivanputski]

"Proven they can take a lickin and keep on pickin" ???

Give me the the green light to cull for one summer... They'll be pickin lead out their bills
Posted from my iPhone/Mobile device