"Scottish Fly Fisher" wrote in message
...
...The cormorant problem is not only a result of overfishing at sea, but
because the birds are protected. Populations have increased massively
since
these birds were placed under protection.....

...If only the could adapt like the gulls, and live off land-fills and by
mugging the occasional drunk for their kebab. :-)

I don't recall ever seeing a cormorant when I was a boy growing up on the
shore of Lake Michigan. As far as I knew, even many years later when I
developed an interest in birds, they were strictly marine birds. As a
matter of fact, I still don't know whether they are considered native on the
Great Lakes. I first started noticing them (much to my excited pleasure)
maybe 15 or 20 years ago. These days it's nearly impossible to spend any
time on the beaches or the lake without seeing many of them, and their
numbers seem to be increasing steadily.

Presumably, they are also protected here as they are not considered to be
either game birds or pests......not yet, anyway.....and protected is the
default status for anything not covered by the other two categories. Not
that protected status makes much difference, I suppose. Nobody seems to be
much interested in shooting them; the days of widespread shooting of
anything that moves are pretty much gone around here.

Interesting that they are burgeoning both here and there. One wonders
whether the same sorts of dynamics are at work.....and what they might be.

Also interesting.....and disturbing.....is the fact that the populations of
gulls (primarily herring gulls and ring-billed gulls) have also been
increasing at an alarming rate, much to the detriment of many of the shore
birds from what I've heard. I haven't researched the matter, so I don't
really know what's behind this rise either, but I do know that it has a lot
of wildlife scientists and managers very concerned.

And then, just about a month ago, I saw my first ever Lake Michigan
pelican....a brown pelican. Not sure that the existence of a pelican here
means anything, but watching all the changes that have taken place in the
past 50 years or so is very unsettling. The Great Lakes ecology is reeling
from one serious blow after another, with no end in sight.

Wolfgang