The Devil’s Cormorant: A Natural History

12 | Gates Island

243 12 s Gates Island united states An attempt is made to point out that the [cormorant] is fully deserving of our protection and that, except in scattered, local instances, it is largely neutral if not actually beneficial in its relationship to man. howard l. mendall, The Home-Life and Economic Status of the Double-Crested Cormorant, 1936 I t’s March again. I can see how cold and windy it is out the window, but I’m comfortable inside sipping coffee. My office is warmly lit by a large paper lantern hand-painted with a Nagara River ukai scene, and I’m surrounded by all of my cultural artifacts about the relationship between humans and cormorants. I have a sort of Victorian curiosities cabinet. It has various skulls and feathers and eggs and bags of guano collected from my travels. On one of the shelves of cormorantabilia I display a preserved skin of a juvenile pelagic cormorant. I had hoped to donate this to the Bird Group at Tring. Students found the cormorant dead on a beach in Northern California. We brought it home on the plane in a cooler. It turns out that there is a taxidermist named Johnny who lives not far from me.In between his work with deer and ducks and fish, he skinned and preserved the dead bird with borax. I was ready to ship the skin to Tring, but it turned out that not only was it illegal to pick up that dead cormorant on the beach without a permit, but it was even more so to take it out of the state of California. Despite the kindness and interest of Robert Prŷs-Jones—and my own eagerness to have something we collected in the historic holdings of the Natural History Museum—I eventually lost motivation with the amount King - Devil's Cormorant.indb 243 7/1/2013 11:31:27 AM 244 the devil’s cormorant of paperwork and favors that would have been necessary to ship the specimen .To be honest, the pelagic pelt does not look attractive on the shelf. It can be morbid for the visitor. I do love the feet, though. I look out the window again. I should really go out to Gates Island. When I walked past the river yesterday I thought I saw in the distance a double-crested cormorant (Phalacrocorax auritus). They should just be arriving now. But the brown, bare branches are shivering out there, so I’m dragging my feet. And even as I sit here in the office debating how lazy and wimpy I am for not wanting to go out on the boat this afternoon, the stories I have shared in this cormorant study continue to evolve. The Army Corps of Engineers just commissioned Bird Research Northwest to “dissuade” over 60 percent of the previous nesting area for the cormorants on East Sand Island this spring. Not without media attention and some minor public protest, they are moving the“Great Wall” dissuasion fence to about the middle of the birds’ former colony.1 Megan Gensler is working at a different Bird Research Northwest site this season , but new researchers like her will be out there on East Sand Island capturing cormorants for tagging and scaring the rest of the birds off, forcing them to disperse and hopefully nest someplace else, away from the large Columbia River runs of salmon smolts. Oregon Fish and Wildlife has asked for permits to go further, to begin culling cormorants on the Columbia River.2 Meanwhile, hazing programs have already been reinstated to the south along the Oregon coast so that volunteers and wildlife managers will try to scare the birds away from these other salmon runs.3 At Louisiana State University’s AgCenter, engineers have been developing a “Scarebot.” This is an autonomous little catamaran the size of a coffee table that paddles around the surface of a pond and not only frightens away the cormorants but also monitors the water conditions.“Scarebot ” has a solar-powered battery, “feelers” to sense the shore, and a gps in which the farmer can set the pond boundaries.“Scarebot” runs quietly until it senses birds, and then paddles unpredictably toward the cormorants to get them up.4 U.S. Representative John Klein, from a southeastern district in Minnesota , just presented to a subcommittee in Congress a new piece of legislation . Klein, working with another Minnesota representative, calls this the “Cormorant Management and Natural Resources Protection Act...