No Lethal Control For Cormorants In The Great Lakes This Spring
Got this from the Michigan Charter Boat News Letter.
For more than a decade, double crested cormorants could be killed in 24 states in the eastern U.S. In the Great Lakes, it was mainly done to protect near shore species such as perch and bass.
But last spring a federal judge stopped the program, saying the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service wasn't doing the research on cormorants necessary to justify killing them.
In the past cormorants have been killed to protect fish in a number of places in the upper Great Lakes, including the Les Cheneaux Islands, Beaver Island, and Ludington.
People in the Les Cheneaux Islands say the water birds devastated the tourism economy there by eating all the perch.
For now, there will not be any human pressure on the cormorant populations and no permits will be issued for 2017. In addition, according to the Fish and Wildlife Service, it might be years before that changes.
This is going to be another nightmare for the Bays de Noc area. The article failed to mention that there was also cormorant control here as well. Another bad decision by a judge that doesn't know what these birds do.
Capt. Keith Wils
