The Double-Crested Cormorant: The Plight of a Feathered Pariah by Linda R. Wires (review)

Of these black, fish-eating seabirds, native to and found throughout North America, Linda Wires writes: “Misrepresentation has become part of the bird’s identity, and irony a constant companion.” For example, in the spring of 2015, on a tiny island at the mouth of the Columbia River, the sharpshooters of the US Fish and Wildlife Service and the Army Corps of Engineers began an unprecedented multiyear program to kill over 15,000 double-crested cormorants at their breeding grounds, at night, while the animals were sleeping. The ironic part is that this tiny island was stabilized by the corps themselves in the first place, providing ideal and rare habitat for these birds beside the runs of trillions of salmon smolt, fish that had been hand raised by hatcheries that (are you following this?) are funded by the corps and the affiliated hydropower agencies. In other words, the government is killing the federally protected birds to try to save the endangered salmon (whose far bigger problems are the dams and the loss of habitat). Wires manages to compile the definitive baseline for the biology, distribution, and management history of this species in North America, while at the same time methodically describing the unethical, deeply rooted antipathy toward these animals. Wires was the lead author on the very scientific information that the USFWS commissioned in order to develop a sound nationwide plan. After she and her coauthors delivered their status report on the bird, Wires declares here that for a decade after the final plan, “I watched the state, tribal, and federal agencies responsible for protecting and managing North American wildlife allow and participate in the destruction of more than a half a million cormorants, despite little biological evidence justifying this as a rational course of action.” Why did you not know about the killing of so many double-crested cormorants? The answer is a part of her point.