Save the Cormorants, Cull the Anglers
Article by Bertie Bertram
EDVILLE—Just for the record, Dick wrote that headline. Circulation was soft last week, he says, so we have to start riling people up, just like the competition. Dick himself is an angler, and I wouldn’t hurt a fly.
But the issue—culling the cormorants—is timely, especially out here in hunting-and-fishing country, where it’s not easy being green. Some days there are so many high-tech bass boats out on the lake they look like they’re storming the beaches at Normandy. The only saving grace is that they obstruct the sea-doo maniacs, which is not nothing.
Angling is the key word here, though, since the anglers have angled to get a fall cull, and Queen’s Park has approved it. The pro-cull lobby claims to be worried about the health of local eco-systems, and maybe it is. But when you actually talk to actual people about actual cormorants, what tends to be top of mind is their prodigious guano (that would be boatloads of birdsh-t —ed.)
The ministry of natural resources and forestry “surveyed cormorant colonies” last year, concluding that in Ontario their numbers are rising and therefore a cull would do them no harm.
But what the “survey” really demonstrated is that there are hundreds of thousands of anglers in the province, all of whom vote, and about 143,000 cormorants, who don’t.
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