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U.S. government plans to cull 11,000 Oregon birds to save salmon

 

By Shelby Sebens





13 hours ago









By Shelby Sebens





PORTLAND, Ore. (Reuters) - The federal government has plans to kill nearly 11,000 double crested cormorants on a small Oregon island over four years in an effort to save embattled salmon, The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers said on Friday.
The plan, in the form of a final Environmental Impact Statement, is under review. If it gets final approval, state agriculture workers could be shooting birds and oiling nests, a process used to keep chicks from hatching, by spring.
The plan is preferred over another alternative that calls for the killing of 18,000 birds by 2018, U.S. Army Corps spokeswoman Diana Fredlund said."This is a difficult situation,” she said."We are trying to balance the salmon and steelhead vs. 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.”
The corps also looked at alternatives that included hazing the birds to get them off the island, but Fredlund said that would just shift the problem elsewhere."We don’t want to just shoot them off the island and let them be somebody else’s problem. This is a regional problem,” she said. The corps’ action came after the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration released a Biological Opinion last year, calling for a decrease of the bird population from about 13,000 breeding pairs now to just under 6,000 or fewer by 2018.
Federal officials say the birds are eating the juvenile salmon and putting the fish population at risk. Many juvenile salmon and steelhead are listed as threatened or endangered under the Endangered Species Act.
But the
Audubon Society of Portland says the real threat to the salmon population is habitat loss, fish hatcheries and dams.
"We feel the birds are being scapegoated while the primary causes of salmon decline are not being adequately addressed,” said Bob Sallinger, the local Audubon Society’s conservation director."Although it’s been reduced, the level of proposed take is still really historic and horrific.”
Sallinger said the
society plans to fight the corps’ decision, which could be finalized as early as mid-March, and was prepared to go to court to try to stop it.
In addition to killing thousands of the birds over four years, the plan calls for the destruction of up to 26,000 nests.
OOC' Response;  As Oregon's most proactive pro-sportsman conservation organization the Oregon Outdoor Council is not surprised by the reactions of the Audubon Society of Portland to the federal government's Environmental Impact Statement's Preferred Management Alternative which adaptively manages the North American continents largest single breeding colony of double-crested cormorants.  Although the Audubon Society of Portland claims to endorse the use of the "best available science," in reality, ignoring the conclusions of over twenty years of credible scientific research, costing taxpayers millions of dollars and then vowing to "go to court to try to stop it" is just another chapter in the long and tiring story of environmental extremism by an animal rights organization that has for decades used the courts to strangle Oregon's economy and paralyze the effectiveness of science based fish and wildlife management programs.  Science-based double crested cormorant culling programs that protect hatchery fish and the economic and social benefits resulting from those programs is one of the preferred directives of the Nationwide Cormorant Management Plan that is being used in nearly 30 states to minimize the risk of adverse impacts to public resources (fish,wildlife, plants, and their habitats) by overly abundant double-crested cormorants.     
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