Europe’s great cormorant has recovered from near-extinction to overabundance in half a century, stoking a long-running debate over population control between fishers troubled by its voracious appetite and conservationists.The large black bird’s relentless raids on the continent’s waters have recently led nine EU members to urge an easing of the culling rules that have protected the species since 1979.“The situation is very bad and keeps worsening,” Peter Bozik from the Slovak Fishing Club said, calling the bird “a terrorist.”
Czech Fishing Union ichthyologist Pavel Vrana poses with a taxidermy cormorant in Prague on Monday.
“When cormorants gather in wintering grounds, they can collect the entire fish population out of the unfrozen water in a moment, or damage it so that it will not survive,” he added.Czech Fishing Union ichthyologist Pavel Vrana said cormorants not only eat fish, but also often injure them or stress them out so they would not reproduce.
“When you have 3,000 cormorants descending on a place, it’s a chainsaw massacre,” he said.Grigore Stefan, from the Murighiol Fishermen’s Association in the Danube Delta, said Romania lost “millions of fish” to cormorants annually.“It’s a harmful animal,” he said. “I don’t know if there are any fish left in the delta this summer.”In the past, Europeans systematically destroyed some cormorant colonies with the help of fire brigades and the military, a European Parliament report showed. Those efforts brought the species close to extinction. By the early 1960s, only a few thousand breeding pairs remained in the main breeding range of the Netherlands, Germany, Denmark, Sweden and Poland. However, since being granted protected status, its numbers have soared to an estimated 2 million in Europe this year.Czech Society for Ornithology head Zdenek Vermouzek said cormorants benefited from overfishing in the Baltic Sea, which has wiped out large predatory fish feeding on smaller fry.“The cormorants have simply replaced these predators,” he said.In central Europe, fish lack hiding places, as authorities are quick to clear natural shelters such as fallen trees, while ponds resemble “fish tubs” with steep banks, making them vulnerable to predators, Vermouzek added.Romania’s General Association of Hunters and Sport Fishermen said cormorants also have “very few natural predators and so multiply uncontrollably.”Vrana proposed oiling eggs in the nest to close the pores through which the embryo breathes as an efficient culling method.“If we want to ecologically and efficiently curb the population, it must happen in the place where they reproduce, no matter how terrible that sounds,” he said. Conservationists disagree, although they accept the practice of shooting cormorants to deter them from areas where fish winter.Vermouzek was skeptical of large-scale measures for which “we don’t have the men and we don’t have the guns.”Instead, he proposed reducing river-clearing operations to give fish better hiding places from the birds and returning to nature-driven management on the region’s exposed ponds.Conservationists and fishers agree humanity is to blame for the damage, but while environmentalists favor letting nature run its course, fishers want greater human intervention.“If mankind has erred, mankind must make amends. We cannot rely on natural mechanisms at a time when nature’s hands are tied,” Vrana said.
