We've Got Issues: Cormorants won't be shot in Great Lakes this year
By Peter Payette • Feb 22, 2017
Credit U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service
Cormorants will be safe from sharp shooters in the Great Lakes this spring. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service is not ready to restart a program that allowed lethal control of the birds to protect sport fish, and the agency says it might be years away.
For more than a decade, the federal government allowed double-crested cormorants to be killed in 24 states in the eastern U.S. In the Great Lakes, it was mainly done to protect sport fish like perch and bass.
Last spring a federal judge stopped the program. He said the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service wasn't doing the research on cormorants necessary to justify killing them.
Sport fishing groups hoped that research would have been done by now and the program could resume. But Jim Johnson, a retired fisheries biologist involved with a citizens group for Lake Huron, says he can't even find anyone at Fish and Wildlife working on the issue.
"Maybe they have assigned somebody," says Johnson. "But we can't find anybody to say, 'oh yeah, I'm working on it.'"
U.S. Fish and Wildlife put out a FAQ sheet late last year that says there is a team in place working on the issue. But an earlier version of the document indicated the issue was not a priority. A later version, dated in December, removed that language.
Peter Payette talks with David Cassleman about the use of lethal control for double-crested cormorants.
Cormorants have been killed to protect fish in a number of places in the upper Great Lakes including the Les Cheneaux Islands, Ludington and Saginaw Bay.
People in the Les Cheneaux Islands say the water birds devastated the tourism economy there by eating all of the perch.
But James Ludwig says those claims are exaggerated. He's an ornithologist and one of the plaintiffs in the lawsuit against the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service that stopped the use of lethal control.
Ludwig says the number of cormorants in the Great Lakes is down sharply, and that's partly because there are fewer fish for the birds to eat.
"It may be a situation where you could relax all pressure on cormorants and they won't respond very much because they don't have very much to eat," he says.
For now there will not be any human pressure on the cormorant population in the Great Lakes. Spring is when most of the lethal control happens here and no permits will be issued this year.
US Fish and Wildlife Service
We've Got Issues
Caspian terns disappearing from the upper Great Lakes
By Peter Payette • Jun 9, 2016
Ohio DNR
Colonies of Caspian terns are becoming harder to find in Lakes Michigan and Huron.
James Ludwig is an ornithologist who has studied migratory birds in the region since the 1960s and just finished a trip across the Canadian waters of Lake Huron. He says he found about 100 Caspian tern nests where he found more than 1,900 in 1995.
Ludwig says the situation for Caspian terns is similar in the Michigan waters of the upper Great Lakes.
Judge rules federal agency overstepped its bounds on cormorant control
By editor • Jun 2, 2016
Peter Payette talks about the cormorant ruling and how people are reacting in the Upper Peninsula.
A federal judge in Washington, D.C. has halted programs to reduce the number of cormorants in the Great Lakes region. The federal government and tribes in Michigan kill the birds to protect yellow perch, walleye and other fish. But the judge said the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service overstepped its bounds when it authorized killing cormorants in more than 20 states.
Peter Payette visited the Les Cheneaux Islands in Michigan this week to talk to people who live there.