Army Engineers Insist on Killing 11,000 Cormorants

Update:  A federal judge refused to stop the slaughter of 10,000 or more comorants living on a artificial island in the Columbia River in May.  He turned down a request from four plaintiffs including the Audubon Society for a preliminary injuntion to prevent the killing of comorants nesting on Sand Island.  The Army Corps of Engineers sees the cull as a solution to the problem of declining numbers of spawning salmon returning to the Columbia River basin.  NOT. The judge took comfort in the fact that only the first year of killing in a four year cull will not result in a species-wide impact.  As of June 11th the killers have shot 125 birds and destroyed 1700 nests.  As usual the federal government is trying to keep their unpopular, lethal activities hidden from the public by shooting birds on their nests at night and releasing a minimum amount of information about the cull.  Government agents waited until a Sunday on Memorial Day weekend to begin their dirty work.  US Person would be ashamed too, if he was ordered to shoot comorants tending their young in the dead of night.

{03.04.15}It is the same unclear thinking that caused an officer in Vietnam to claim, "we had to destroy the village in order to save it". In this case the Army Corps of Engineers wants to kill 11,000 double crested cormorants (Phalacrocorax auritus) that nest on an island in the Columbia River estuary. Their offense is they eat too many salmon to please fishermen. Originally the Corps wanted to exterminate all 18,000 birds, but that proposal was too drastic even for the Corps. Now the plan is to kill only eleven thousand and use non-lethal tactics to reduce the number of breeding pairs from about 13,000 to 5600 on East Sand Island. The Army believes the cormorants consume an average of 11 million juvenile salmon each year. A commercial valuable fish, the Columbia River salmon and steelhead runs have been in decline for years despite expensive recovery efforts. The cormorant population is not doing well in its range except for the colony on East Sand. The 62 acre spit is man-made from dredging spoils. It is a nesting site for another bird that eats juvenile salmon: the Caspian tern. The tern colony, one of the largest on the west coast, was moved by the Corps to East Sand from another artificial island farther upstream. So it seems that this perceived problem is mostly man-made. The same can be said for shooting sea lions and seals that eat adult salmon near the first of several man-made barriers across the Columbia, the Bonneville Dam.

The Portland Audubon Society has promised to go to court to obtain an injunction against the proposed cull. The organization thinks the action is too drastic and not the underlying cause of declining salmon population. Habitat loss is driving the decline in salmon numbers and the proposed cull is 15% if the double-crested cormorant population west of the Rocky Mountains. The cormorants are protected under the Migratory Bird Treaty Act which will require the Corps to get several permits before it can "take" eleven thousand seabirds birds doing what comes naturally--eating fish and feeding their young. The fact is that shore birds along the west coast are generally not thriving. Some observers think this phenomenon is caused by less food in an ocean that is becoming increasingly sterile. The kill plan is drawing a lot of public attention; the Corps received 152,000 comments on the draft EIS. The final plan is open for public comment until March 16th. There is a lesson here: seeking a scapegoat does not solve a systemic problem--man's mismanagement of an important riverine ecosystem. Tell the Corps.