Sharon Hill, Windsor Star
March 8, 2008
Parks Canada is proposing to shoot double-crested cormorants on Middle Island in April.
"It's a slaughter," AnnaMaria Valastro of the Peaceful Parks Coalition said Friday. "I've seen them shoot the birds. It's terrible."
Valastro is a London resident who visited Middle Island in the summer with a Star reporter and plans to head to Leamington this weekend to start a campaign to boycott Point Pelee National Park, which owns the 18.5-hectare island.
The double-crested cormorants are dedicated parents who won't leave their nests, she said. Thousands of birds could be shot, she said.
Marian Stranak, superintendent of Point Pelee National Park, said she doesn't know how many cormorants could be culled during the first year of a five-year plan but the culls, if approved, must take place in April. Stationary male and female adults from a nest would be shot by staff with rifles prior to the eggs hatching. A cull could take three to four weeks.
An environmental assessment will be done. An online notice of that also talks of nest removal and deterrents such as scarecrows in some trees.
The plan, that could be changed depending on nesting trends, is to reduce the number of nests on the island from about 4,000 down to 440 to 840 in the next five years, Stranak said.
Culls are needed to protect a rare Carolinian ecosystem and nine federal species at risk from trees to monarch butterfly and the threatened eastern fox snake, she said. The rain of guano kills vegetation, the trees and the snake's habitat, she said.
Although the cormorants are a native species, they have caused an "imbalance," Stranak said.
"The goal is not to eliminate cormorants from the island. The goal is simply to reduce their nesting numbers in order for the island and all of the rest of the species that depend on that island to be able to maintain themselves and exist which is not what's happening now."
Liz White, a spokeswoman for Cormorant Defenders International, said the fish-eating cormorants were almost wiped out by hunting and DDT and have made a comeback. She said the native birds don't like human activity and nest on islands in what she called a healthy, normal ecosystem.
White said it's a choice between a natural park and a museum. "If a native species cannot nest in a national park in a protected island then where can they nest? Where is it acceptable for cormorants to be?"
Parks Canada must complete an environmental assessment and posted an online notice this week that one will be done. The notice said research and monitoring had concluded the "ecological integrity of the island's Carolinian ecosystem is degrading" because of the cormorants.
The next step will be to invite public comment for a minimum of 21 days and depending on the comments, Parks Canada or the Environment Ministry will make a decision on the cull and management plan, Stranak said.
In 1987 three double-crested cormorant nests were recorded on Middle Island. By 2000 there were 5,202 nests and last year there were 4,026 nests.