The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS), in cooperation with the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Wildlife Services, intends to expand the unnecessary slaughter of double-crested cormorants to an estimated 160,000 birds per year.

These cormorants, large fish-eating water birds native to North America, are blamed by some for declining freshwater fish populations, even though research indicates that over-fishing, pollution, and competition by non-native fish are the real causes of fish population declines. At aquaculture facilities and fish hatcheries, the damage sometimes caused by cormorants can be effectively minimized using largely non-lethal means. This calls into question both the need and effectiveness of the federal government's cormorant management plan.

The HSUS needs your help to prevent the USFWS and USDA from carrying out their lethal plan against cormorants, whose populations are beginning to recover in some regions after years of persecution by humans. The importance of this management plan reaches beyond cormorants and their ecosystems, as it has implications for other fish-eating birds like the great blue heron and pelicans.

What You Can Do

The USFWS is accepting written comments until September 22, 2003, on its Final Environmental Impact Statement (FEIS) on double-crested cormorant management in the United States. Please write to the USFWS to express your disapproval of the plan, which includes expanded lethal control at fish farms and winter roosts, and a new public resource depredation order (see below for details).

Make the point that the USFWS should accept the research indicating that cormorant predation on wild fish is a natural phenomenon and generally does not affect the catch of favored sport and commercial fish species.

Tell the USFWS that, in the special case of fish farms, where artificial conditions make fish more vulnerable to avian predators, the USFWS should adopt a policy in which only non-lethal management techniques are employed. If lethal control of cormorants is allowed at all on fish farms, it should only be used infrequently and in limited circumstances, as a way to reinforce non-lethal harassment techniques. Finally, request that at the very least, the USFWS should retain its current management policy.

If you have time, you may also want to make some of the following points in your letter:

• Scientific evidence indicates that double-crested cormorants generally have no serious impact on populations of fish valued by sport and commercial anglers, except in localized cases. Cormorants may impact fish populations in artificial situations, where lakes or ponds are more intensively managed.
• Non-lethal techniques can effectively prevent cormorants from eating fish at hatcheries and aquaculture facilities. These methods include the use of bird barriers over fish ponds, changes in facility design or management, changes in fish-release techniques at hatcheries, and scare tactics.
• Other countries have successfully employed non-lethal—or primarily non-lethal—strategies for reducing the effects of fish-eating birds on fish farms. In Israel, for example, the closely related great cormorant causes similar conflicts at fish farms. But Israelis rely almost entirely—and with success—on innovative non-lethal means of protecting fish at aquaculture facilities.
• There is evidence that increased lethal cormorant control—or even the current level of lethal control—will not alleviate problems at fish farms.
• The USFWS should address the human causes of declining wild fish populations (such as over-fishing, pollution, and competition with stocked non-native fish). Killing cormorants is, at best, a short-term fix to a problem that requires a long-term solution.
• Cormorants are not over-populated. Though their populations have increased greatly in some regions in the past two decades, this increase is, at least in part, a population recovery after a long history of persecution by humans and exposure to contaminants such as DDT. Their recovery means that we must learn to live with them, not return them to the low population sizes of the recent past.

Please put your concerns into your own words and send, preferably via regular mail or fax, to:

Division of Migratory Bird Management
U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service
4401 North Fairfax Drive
Mail Stop MBSP-4107
Arlington, VA 22203
Fax: 703-358-2272
E-mail: cormorants@fws.gov

For more information on the USFWS's cormorant management plan, please see our Background Information on the following page. Background Information

There are two components to the proposed cormorant management plan.

First, to address the concerns of fish farmers, the USFWS plans to allow cormorants to be killed at their winter roosts (as well as at the fish farms themselves), even though these roosts may be miles from any fish farm. Fish farm operators will not even be required to attempt non-lethal control measures before initiating lethal methods, including shooting, neck breaking, and poisoning via carbon dioxide, as well as egg and nest destruction.

Second, the USFWS is proposing a "public resource depredation order." This order would allow state and federal wildlife agencies in 24 states to kill any cormorant thought to be damaging commercially valuable fish populations or other "public resources" (e.g., the trees in which cormorants sometimes nest). This would allow cormorants to be killed on natural ponds, rivers, and lakes, where the birds are doing nothing more blameworthy than simply behaving as fish-eating birds have behaved for millions of years.

Already 45,000 cormorants are killed every year. Much of the current lethal control occurs at aquaculture facilities and fish hatcheries in 13 states where conflicts with these birds most often occur (Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, Minnesota, Mississippi, North Carolina, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Tennessee, and Texas). A "depredation order" issued by the USFWS in 1998 allows lethal cormorant control at aquaculture facilities in these states without a permit. Outside of those states, the USFWS issues "depredation permits" on a case-by-case basis for hatcheries and aquaculture facilities.

Though there are legitimate concerns regarding cormorants at hatcheries and aquaculture facilities, these problems can generally be resolved without killing the birds, as Israelis have proven in their non-lethal approaches in dealing with the great cormorant, which causes similar conflicts at fish farms. If practical experience didn't provide enough evidence, research has also demonstrated the effectiveness of non-lethal control of cormorants at fish farms.

Just as important, research has shown that these birds generally do not reduce populations of fish that are valuable to humans. Fish populations are affected by a complex set of factors of which predation by cormorants is just one component. Cormorants and other fish-eating birds may impact fish populations in highly contrived situations, such as lakes or rivers that are intensively managed, or where fish populations are already declining for other reasons. Nevertheless, the USFWS, in cooperation with the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), is proposing to allow for increased killing of cormorants in many more states under a variety of circumstances.

The HSUS believes the public resource depredation order is clearly not justified, as scientists have shown that cormorants tend not to limit the fish species valued by humans.

There is evidence that increased lethal control—or even the current level of lethal control—will not alleviate problems at fish farms. Shooting cormorants at one fish farm may simply cause the birds to move to another farm.

In addition, little is known about how a cormorant population would respond to the serious reduction or elimination of a local population, which would be allowed under the proposed plan. Such a population reduction may result in a rapid population rebound via increased reproduction by surviving birds and/or a rapid influx of cormorants from another nearby population—meaning no long-term effect on the overall population size, but suffering on the part of the birds who are killed. Alternatively, cormorants may not be able to recover from such a decline locally, and may require expensive and time-consuming protection in the future.

The USFWS has acknowledged that, under this plan, local cormorant populations in some areas may be greatly reduced or even wiped out, but it doesn't consider this a problem. The USFWS and USDA seem content to continue in the tradition of caving in to demands for more lethal control of an unfairly vilified species (wolves and grizzlies are other shining examples) until the eradication becomes so widespread that the species then requires Endangered Species Act protection. With the cormorant plan, the federal government is turning its sights from mammals to fish-eating birds, and the implications are disturbing.

The proposed management plan is outlined in the USFWS's Final Environmental Impact Statement (FEIS). There are copies of the FEIS available at migratorybirds.fws.gov. You may also request a copy or ask for additional information or clarification by e-mailing or writing to the USFWS at the address above or calling 703-358-1714.