Who Put Cormorants in Charge of Our Fisheries?
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ANYONE WHO HAS BEEN in my company when conversation turned to fishing recently likely has heard my opinion of cormorants, and it isn’t favorable. I’ve written and spoken unkindly of them for decades now and have no intention of slowing my campaign of education on what they do to Texas fisheries.
There actually are six species of cormorants native to North America, not a one of them are worth a plugged nickel to view or to eat. That contradicts the folkloric notion that cormorants were a centuries-ago gift from some faraway ruler, but it doesn’t change what cormorants do wherever they go.
In total, their North American population is pegged at somewhere between 800,000 and more than a million. On average, each of them consumes about a pound of fish daily. When food is abundant, they can and do eat lots more.
Never mind what they look like. Not all babies are pretty. Never mind that when they take over a water body and rest or dry their wings on piers or bulkheads or in trees, they defecate until the entire surface below them appears covered in flat latex ceiling paint.
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My greater concern is their ability to quite literally destroy pond and small-lake fisheries, something I’ve learned firsthand.
For nearly 10 years now, I’ve enjoyed access to what once were a pair of quality, private fishing lakes, 12-15 acres total of premier water. My young son and I could walk the banks there most any afternoon and catch three or four dozen bass in two hours. Didn’t matter what we threw, didn’t matter whether the sky was gray or blue. Windy. Calm. Hot. Cold. Didn’t matter.
The smaller of the two lakes was a little skewed toward fish of about a pound but produced a few each day up to five. The larger lake held fewer but significantly larger fish. I’ve caught one legit double-digit bass from that piece of water and several from five to nine pounds.
Back to the birds. For so long as I’ve fished those lakes, there were always a few cormorants hanging around. Half a dozen one day, maybe a dozen the next, but nothing noteworthy.
Then during summer maybe four or five years ago, I was excited to see a major shad hatch on the big lake. Millions of tiny fish, shining like newly minted quarters and showering in all directions when my lure hit the water – or when a few young bass chased them to the surface. Much fun was had on white crankbaits and spinnerbaits then.
A week or two later, when those shad were a couple inches long, suddenly there were hundreds if not a thousand cormorants on site. And what I witnessed for the next several days was nothing short of the absolute annihilation of those forage fish.
Working in unison, that legion of cormorants would land on the water, spread their ranks 40 or 50 yards wide, and then dive and push and dive and push everything in front of them into shallow water where they were savaged by the birds. Any shad that somehow escaped the cormorants was picked off by wading birds that knew what was up and had gathered along the bank.
When they finished in one corner of a lake, they’d all lift off and go to another, herding shad and gorging themselves nearly all day long. This routine would continue, I’ve witnessed several times since, I presume, until they’d picked the lakes clean of small fish.
The day after they’d done their damage, only that original handful of cormorants was on hand, there I can only assume to serve as watchkeepers until the next hatch. And every time since I’ve seen the shiny flickers of new shad on the lake surface, hundreds more cormorants returned a short time later to repeat the same, devastating event.
It’s not just small shad those birds eat, either. There are accounts of cormorants eating largemouth bass nearly a foot long, which I fear has been the fate of nearly all of both lakes’ juvenile bass and the once-countless sunfish in that smaller lake.
So what to do about cormorants and their devastation?
The Texas Parks and Wildlife Department offers permits now to “control” these birds in areas where they’re shown to have significant detrimental effect on fisheries. But the problem in too many cases now is that the birds are destroying fisheries on lakes and ponds in neighborhoods and subdivisions, on golf courses and parks and other places where shooting them would be difficult at best and potentially unsafe for people anywhere nearby.
I don’t know what can be done on the lakes referenced above or the thousands more small water bodies in our state plucked clean by these ghastly birds, but I’m open to suggestions.
Here’s why: Even knowing that lake as intimately as I do, my past six attempts at fishing there have generated a grand total of zero bites. Not one. And for the youngsters and old men who so enjoyed that opportunity for so long, that’s tragic.
I taught at least a dozen kids how to fish there, including my son, and they loved learning – because they caught fish. Now, even I’ve quit trying there, and I’m among the most optimistic people ever to make a cast.
If Texas truly treasures its freshwater fisheries, TPWD needs to step in and step up to reduce the cormorant population statewide.
Email Doug Pike at ContactUs@fishgame.com
DIGITAL BONUS: World’s Most Hated Birds
From ALL THINGS BIRDIE: Cormorants are found all over the world. They may be a bird you see on coasts or in wetlands diving for fish, or standing on the shore with their wings held out to dry. But did you know that cormorants have a history of being hated and exploited by many humans…
