Government Takes Aim
At CormorantsMinistry showing a crazy kind of George W. Bush logic
Thomas Walkom, The Toronto Star
May 28, 2005
Premier Dalton McGuinty's Liberal government is killing birds again. The target this year is 5,500, down from the 6,030 the government killed in 2004.
The doomed birds are double-crested cormorants unfortunate enough to be nesting on two small islands at Presqu'ile Provincial Park near Trenton.
The McGuinty government seems to have it in for these waterfowl. The purported reason for what it calls its "management activities" is that cormorants are wrecking the habitat — killing trees and squeezing out birds that the Liberals prefer, such as herons.
There's a crazy kind of George W. Bush, kill-for-peace logic at work here. Bush's war to bring democracy to Iraq pretty much destroyed a place that was already in rough shape.
McGuinty's war on cormorants is also producing perverse results.
In order to protect Presqu'ile's delicate vegetation, gunmen are racing through the undergrowth on all-terrain vehicles. They are shooting cormorants, destroying treetop nests and pouring oil on eggs to prevent young birds from hatching.
Apparently, McGuinty's sharpshooters aren't always that accurate. Liz White from the pro-cormorant group Animal Alliance said yesterday that protestors canoeing a few metres offshore are picking plenty of wounded birds out of Lake Ontario.
Meanwhile on shore, dead birds are collected and dragged through the bush to a central area. Gull and High Bluff Islands don't have much topsoil, so the bodies are mixed with straw and left to rot. Members of the public are barred from the islands until fall. But even then, I am told, the stench is quite remarkable.
"When ministry staff use ATVs to create trails to dump 15,000 pounds of dead cormorants ... on the very island they claim to be protecting, it becomes evident that their objective is not about preserving the natural ecology of the area," the environmental group Earthroots wrote scathingly this month.
Moreover, it's not clear that birds the government wants to help — the great blue herons, great egrets, red-tailed hawks and black-crowned night herons — appreciate the fine distinctions involved in the slaughter.
A government committee set up to review the effects of last year's slaughter reported in November that the one red-tailed hawk on the islets quickly skedaddled once the shooting began.
"This may have been the result of the management activities," it noted blandly.
Great blue herons and great egrets appeared to stick around, the committee concluded. But it said — without any visible sense of irony — that it couldn't judge the effect on black-crowned night herons because of "the extreme sensitivity of this species to disturbance."
The ministry of natural resources says that so far this year there are fewer herons nesting at Presqu'ile but more egrets.
Cormorants have never been universally popular. They squawk. They are not cute. They eat fish, which irritates sport fishermen.
In fact, there's considerable evidence that cormorants don't eat the kinds of fish that fishermen prefer. But this has not improved their reputation in the sporting world.
Like herons, cormorants nest in large numbers, taking over entire stands of trees. Like all birds, they defecate. Cormorant droppings smell bad. And like heron droppings, they eventually kill the trees in which the birds nest.
This irritates cottagers.
Still, cormorants are resilient. Queen's Park tried to eradicate them in the '50s on behalf of fishermen. During the '60s, they were almost wiped out by the pesticide DDT. But when DDT was banned, the cormorants rebounded.
Earlier this year, Toronto Mayor David Miller proclaimed April 12 Cormorant Day to honour the waterfront colony that nests on the Leslie Street spit.
Calling them "amazing and magnificent birds," Miller said it was time to recognize the cormorants' importance "to a natural and healthy environment."
It was a nice sentiment. Certainly, it made more sense than what's going on now at Presqu'ile.