FRIDAY,
NOVEMBER 16, 2018
By TIM
ROWLAND
Thirty
years ago, with increasing frequency, squadrons of black seabirds were spotted
on Lake Champlain flying low and fast across the water as if on some sort of
black-ops raiding mission. Their appearance was something of an environmental
success that, in the eyes of many, quickly turned into an environmental
catastrophe.
The
same scene was playing out on the Great Lakes and the Pacific, as the
double-crested cormorant made a miraculous recovery after the ban
on DDT, a pesticide that had once imperiled the
bird’s existence. But while conservationists hailed the return
of birds such as the bald eagle, they
became increasingly wary of the collateral success represented
by the cormorant.
As the
population surged, once-lush Lake Champlain islands were one-by-one
commandeered and summarily defoliated by the cormorants, whose populations had
exploded from a single nesting pair into a population that peaked
at more than 20,000. Anglers fretted as well, as cormorants
slurped down tons of fish, most notably the yellow perch that is an important
part of the aquatic food chain and the star attraction at many a lakeside fish
fry.
In 2003,
the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, citing fears of cormorant overpopulation,
allowed state conservation agencies to “take” cormorants without a permit
(owners of private fish farms had been allowed to do so since 1998). Thus
empowered, the state of Vermont began to oil eggs — spraying eggs with oil
keeps out oxygen and stops their development — to prevent them from
hatching, soon to be followed by conservation agencies in New York. The
feds further allowed states to shoot excess birds by the thousands in an
attempt to restore pre-cormorant equilibrium. What followed has been a case
study in the successes, the failures, and most of all the unknowns and
frustrations that arise when attempting to micromanage the
environment.
