Just curious - how long ago did this happen? Seems like if it was recent the tree-huggers and conservationists would have been going nuts.
No, this wasn't recent at all. I wanna say late 40s or early 50s, but it might have been earlier than that. It's been quite some time since I came across the information, and it was while I was reading some stuff about sockeye salmon, not eagles.
What made me think of the information was a very recent story that I found to be utterly ironic. In the Columbia River basin they dredge a lot to keep shipping lanes open. The dredging has created sandbars, which is the ideal breeding ground for double-crested cormorants, a sea bird that's common around the Great Lakes and other inland waterways and coastal areas, as well.
In the Great Lakes, the double-crested cormorant populations have exploded largely because of the colonization of a non-native fish in the Lakes, a herring known as the alewife, which is a prey fish without any predators in the Great Lakes. They eat a lot of sports fish. It's a shad, commonly used as bait by fishermen. About 8 inches long, silver and very shiny. You know the fish.
For a plethora of reasons (including resurgent stripped bass populations) their numbers are in steep decline in New England (primary bait for lobster pots) and down towards the Carolinas, and those states now prohibit the taking and possession of these shad. Ironic because the populations in the Great Lakes are just the opposite. In the Great Lakes they introduced Pacific salmon to help control the alewife population, something that fishermen like, except that alewife is still killing off sportfish by preying on them, and because the alewife is a voracious eater of zooplankton (mostly water fleas) that other fish feed on, so they're winning the competition.
But these alewife shad are easy pickens for the double-crested cormorants and has allowed these birds to become quite numerous in the Great Lakes (mostly in Lake Michigan and Lake Huron, but all over, really). The US Fish and Wildlife Service has instituted several measures to stem the growing populations, including reducing the number of nests. Canada is in on it, too, by severely reducing the number of nests on Middle Island and Point Pelee National Park in Lake Erie. There is no hunting season on these birds yet, so the general public is not yet involved.
Now back to the Columbia River basin and the double-crested cormorant problem, where Army Corps of Engineers, who manages hydroelectric dams and dredges the Columbia River, is required by the Endangered Species Act to come up with a management plan to control the seabird population that is out of control. On East Sand Island alone there is normally 100 nesting pairs, and because of the dredging they now number about 15,000 nesting pairs. And that's just in one spot, doesn't include all the other nesting sites these birds have, but other sites have seen the same population explosions.
The Corps proposed 4 plans, three of which don't involve killing the birds, and one, the preferred option, involves shooting the birds and the taking of eggs. The US Fish and Wildlife Service strongly endorses the killing plan, and isn't that ironic. Also ironic is, during open house public comment by the Army Corps of Engineers and the US Fish and Wildlife Service, Tommy Huntington, a fisherman in the Columbia River estuary said,
"I can't believe in this day and age we can't come up with an alternative solution to killing things. You have to kill one to save the other one? It doesn't make any sense." And he's not alone in his sentiment among sport and commercial fishermen in the area. Told ya it was ironic.
So, the killing plan? Wanna know what it is? If you think 10,000 eagles in a year is a lot, and it is, that's small potatoes compared to what they want to do in the last 3-4 months of this year. The comment period ends August 19, and if all goes according to plan, they'll begin culling the birds the first week of September.
They want to eliminate 16,000 double-crested cormorants by the end of the year.
