Ludington, Mich. — Double-crested cormorants eat an estimated 77 million pounds of fish a year from the Great Lakes. That number is based on a population of about 230,000 of the diving fisheaters now living and nesting around the Great Lakes.
Cormorant populations are well above historic levels and are affecting the highly stressed Great Lakes fishery, according to Randall Claramunt, Michigan DNR Lake Huron basin coordinator.
Cormorants have direct impacts on valuable and sensitive fish populations. Each bird eats 1.3 to 1.6 pounds of fish daily.
Claramunt presented those facts to a U.S. House of Representatives Natural Resources Committee oversight subcommittee hearing in Alpena earlier this month. Without control measures, cormorant populations will have a harmful impact on fisheries and communities, he said.
While some say double-crested cormorants eat mostly round goby, sculpin and other preyfish most of the year, they are known to target yellow perch, especially in April, when perch move into shallow spawning waters. The contention that since 90 percent or more of a cormorant’s diet comes from non-sport species, Claramunt said, misses two important points.
First, preyfish populations are already greatly reduced in the Great Lakes – by 80 to 90 percent in Lake Huron – and the preyfish that cormorants eat will not be available to the sport fish species such as salmon and trout that Michigan and other states manage and stock. Plus, he said, that argument doesn’t take into account the harm that cormorants do to the perch, walleye, northern pike, bass and whitefish populations that the birds eat.
Michigan 1st District U.S. Rep. Jack Bergman and Arkansas Rep. Bruce Waterman, the committee’s oversight chairman, took part in the hearing brought to Michigan to study the issues and what might be done about reinstating cormorant depredation control orders to protect free-swimming fish.
In a statement after the hearing, Bergman said it “shed even more light on the need for proper management and passing of H.R. 4429, the Cormorant Control Act.”
He sponsored the bill which would allow states, in cooperation with federal agencies, to once again manage local double-crested cormorant populations when it is determined cormorants are hurting local fisheries.
A federal court in May 2016 blocked double-crested cormorant depredation control orders used for more than a decade by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS) and other agencies, including the Michigan DNR, to manage cormorant populations.
Eliminating cormorants wasn’t the goal of the blocked orders. Rather, finding a sustainable balance between the migratory bird and local fisheries was. Cormorants fall under international migratory bird treaties. Overall management falls to the USFWS.
The court ruled that the USFWS hadn’t thoroughly studied how the depredation orders affected cormorants and fish populations so it blocked use of the orders until more research was done.
This is now the second summer that egg oiling and culling that had been used for about 15 years previously is not allowed to reduce local populations of cormorants harming a fishery. Statewide, only 3,000 cormorants will be allowed to be taken in 2018 – all for reasons other than protecting free-swimming fish.
The new order allows in Michigan limited take – lethal control – of cormorants for purposes of protecting vegetation, property, human health or an endangered species co-nesting in the area. Taking cormorants to protect fish farms is again legal, but not to protect free-swimming fish – the fish that anglers seek. Ironically, fish when being raised in a hatchery can be protected under the change, but when those fish are released during stocking, they are on their own. All that is allowed is harassment of cormorants.
Cormorants have harmed fisheries in places such as the Les Cheneaux Islands along the northern shore of Lake Huron. Michigan DNR data shows cormorants once all but wiped out the Les Cheneaux yellow perch fishery that is an economic lifeblood of the area’s local tourism. When culling and egg oiling were used to control the cormorant populations, yellow perch and other fish species rebounded, Claramunt said.
Saginaw Bay, the Beaver Islands and Bays de Noc are among other areas that have been impacted by cormorants. Daniel Eichinger, executive director of the Michigan United Conservation Clubs, also cited cormorants at Ludington Pumped Storage Plant as a concern..
Tom Cooper, USFWS chief of the migratory bird program, said as cormorant numbers have increased, so have conflicts. In November, the USFWS completed studies of the effects on aquaculture and is now turning its attention to free-swimming fish.
He said the USFWS will meet with state partners, including the DNR this summer, to gather data the state has. Michigan is considered to have the best data about the effect of double-crested cormorants on fish especially in the Les Cheneaux Islands. Cooper said the agency hopes to complete late this year its environmental assessment of the free-swimming fish portion of the issue most important to Great Lakes states.
“We continue to collect data and look forward to working with our state partners,” Cooper said.
Bergman pressed Cooper for a more definitive timeline and working with a greater sense of urgency in studying the issues the court cited.
Mark Engle, owner of Les Cheneaux Landing fishing resort since 1972, told of the damage unrestrained cormorant populations did and can do to a fishery. The islands offer a small, boat fishery where people rent cabins and fish in the protected waters between Hessel and Cedarville, he said.
When cormorants arrived in large numbers, – as many as 1,000 off his docks – they wiped out perch and almost his business. Under the now-blocked depredation order, culling and egg-oiling brought cormorant populations way down. Perch and other fish reappeared and so did his customers, many of whom had quit renting cabins when fishing got poor.
Engle testified he’s worried perch populations will decrease again if agencies can’t use culling and egg oiling in management plans.
Cooper said the USFWS supports Bergman’s bill that would rescind the court order and allow culling and egg-oiling again.
Eichinger, however, said the USFWS has been “inexplicably absent” in moving the required environmental assessment forward. Cormorants, he said, favor juvenile fish, 6 inches or smaller, of many popular species, and can greatly harm annual recruitment.
Claramunt said cormorants also prey heavily as the DNR stocks salmon and trout. He said cormorants have the potential to greatly harm the annual $10 million-a-year DNR stocking efforts that plant about 20 million salmon and brown trout in Michigan waters of the Great Lakes.
“Without lethal control at our stocking sites, we are at risk of losing millions of dollars of stocked fish every year,” Claramunt said.
Eichinger said clear and documented evidence shows an overabundance of cormorants causes declines in prized sport fishery, both in the Great Lakes and inland lakes such as Higgins Lake, Houghton Lake and, around Ludington, both inland and in Lake Michigan.
He said there is a direct relationship between quality fishing experience and the number of fishing licenses sold. If license sales decline, that could directly undermine the state’s ability to do effective fisheries management, he said.
DNR staff working on the cormorant/fishery issue said they’d be happy if the hearing and coming USFWs assessment meetings clear the way for the federal and state agencies to again work together on management plans to protect fisheries.
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