Back in February this year, Digital Journal reported the Army Corps of Engineers unveiled their plan to kill off over 11,000 double-crested cormorants, over a period of four years, on an island at the mouth of the Columbia River in Oregon.
Reuters reported on Friday the culling operation resulted in a lawsuit being filed last month in federal court brought by the Audubon Society and other conservation groups seeking to stop the killings, and demanding an investigation into a report released recently by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service USFWS) that shows killing the birds would not save the threatened salmon.
The USFWS report named in the lawsuit was released under a court order in early August, and concluded that salmon and steelhead fingerlings eaten by the cormorants would be eaten by other fish and other predators if they were not there.
Wildlife officials say the killings will continue at least through mid-October when the seabirds migrate for the winter. The Daily Mail quotes Bob Sallinger, conservation director of the Audubon Society of Portland. “Government agents are racing about in their boat blowing birds out of the sky. The public has a right to see how the federal government is squandering millions of taxpayer dollars killing protected wild birds.”
Sallinger says the issue goes far beyond just killing thousands of seabirds. He points out the agency is making decisions that contradict their own research, adding, “this is about the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and their scientific integrity.”
“The Service ignored its own science,” Collette Adkins, attorney and biologist at the Center for Biological Diversity, said in a statement on August 12. “The agency’s own analysis makes clear that its cormorant-killing program is doing nothing to help endangered fish. … The killing needs to stop now.”
Seabird populations are already in decline
Last week, Digital Journal reported on a new study of the seabird population worldwide, conducted by scientists at the University of British Columbia.
The research found that seabird populations have decreased by as much as 70 percent, due to a number of factors. So it is profoundly disturbing to me that the federal government should be involved in killing off any seabirds.
Diana Fredlund, a spokesperson for the Corps of Engineers said in February, “We are trying to balance the salmon and steelhead versus the birds. It’s very difficult to find the right answer and so it’s taken us a long time. We’ve had a lot of experts working on it.”
Here is an important issue has been overlooked. The decline in salmon and steelheads is not being fully addressed. The Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife Issued a plan for the conservation and recovery of salmon and steelhead in the lower Columbia River basin recently.
In the plan, the DFW cites specific reasons for the decline of these important fish populations, saying: “There are many factors that have contributed to declining steelhead and salmon populations in the Lower Columbia River Basin. Chief among them are loss of habitat, high harvest levels and the effect of hydropower operations.”
It should be noted that controlling predation by other fish, terns and marine mammals is far down on the state’s list of solutions. More prominent is the restoration of critical habitat and better management of the Columbia River hydropower system.
So it leads me to wonder why in the world our federal government is not only killing off threatened seabirds, but why they aren’t getting their collective act’s together to find out what in the heck other local and state agencies, scientists, and concerned citizens groups are saying and doing.
