The Double-Crested Cormorant: Symbol of Ecological Conflict

1. Assault on Little Galloo Island: An Act of Desperation

1  Assault on Little Galloo Island An Act of Desperation in the long run, 1998 was probably an average year, but it did have its own “‹rsts,” its own records set, and its own claims to fame. In the world at large, Serbs and ethnic Albanians fought bloody battles in Kosovo; neighboring adversaries, India and Pakistan, detonated several nuclear devices in multiple tests; and three hundred million Europeans living in eleven countries agreed to deal in a single currency, the euro. In the United States, the House of Representatives impeached President Bill Clinton for lying about his affair with White House intern Monica Lewinsky and the New York Yankees claimed the World Series championship by defeating the San Diego Padres four games to zero. In theaters, the movie Titanic became the highest-grossing ‹lm ever, winning eleven Academy Awards. And on the small screen, seventy-six million American TV viewers watched the ‹nal episode of Seinfeld. Looking at the US economy in 1998, we paid just 32 cents for ‹rst-class stamps and $1.03 for a gallon of regular gas, while only 4.7 percent of us showed up in government unemployment statistics, less than half of what we counted in 2010. On a far, far smaller scale, the sport ‹shing boat trips and harvests on Lake Ontario plummeted for still another season. And a person or persons unknown illegally killed nearly a thousand federally protected double-crested cormorants on Little Galloo Island . Besides the growing scarcity of game ‹sh and ‹shermen, everything seemed the same as the previous year in New York’s upstate village of Henderson Harbor on Lake Ontario. The same was true the year before that as well, with fewer recreational ‹shermen coming to town and apparently lighter weight ‹shing coolers being unloaded at the dock. Business owners looked at their “Beat Yesterday” sales ledgers and saw those black-ink ‹gures shrinking. More and more often, daily and weekly ‹gures were entered in red, indicating decreases, and owners soon reconsidered their summer payroll budgets. So not everything was the same. The ‹sh were disappearing, and there were more of those “damn ‹sh-eating cormorants” on Little Galloo than anyone in town could remember. The idea that maybe somebody should do something about that circulated throughout Henderson Harbor. Not everyone within a modest radius of Little Galloo was happy about recent conditions on and about the island. Contentment was probably as far from what was in the minds of local residents as one could imagine. The fact that thousands of birds had taken a shine to summering on Little Galloo was not really the problem. Generally, most people like birds. But not these birds. These birds, double-crested cormorants, ate ‹sh and lots of them. But birds that eat ‹sh are not always considered a problem. Seagulls, for instance, feed regularly on ‹sh and in some coastal areas they are not well-liked, but they are tolerated, because again, in general, most people like birds. The dif‹culty that arises with cormorants is that they often feed on the same ‹sh as humans do, the same ‹sh, in fact, that some humans, ‹shermen, pay other humans, charter boat captains, money to help catch them. Cormorants soon became the enemy, and enemies meant con›icts. Charter boat ‹shing in eastern Lake Ontario wasn’t just a business. It was the business. Henderson Harbor was a ‹shing village located just a few miles from Little Galloo’s nesting cormorants. The village at one time proclaimed itself the “Home of the Black Bass” and had erected signs at entrances to the town certifying it.1 A species of black bass, the smallmouth bass, was one of the top ‹sh sought by Lake Ontario anglers . Henderson Harbor continued to exist as a village and a political entity primarily due to the smallmouth bass and the sport‹shing industry associated with it. Without the in›ux of ‹shing dollars spent on bait, tackle, and charters, and in the restaurants, taverns, marinas, and motels, Henderson Harbor would not be what it was: a ‹shing destina2 • the double-crested cormorant tion. Without the ‹sh there would be no ‹shing, no ‹shermen, and no ‹shing dollars. Business owners would then have to cut their seasonal payrolls, thereby reducing the town’s total disposable income for the season and the year. It was said by the charter captains that the growing numbers of...