No one has a good word to say for the cormorant. Except, that is, for those people out East who tame a bird, put a ring round its neck so that it cannot swallow its prey, and then send it out fishing for the family - and maybe the business. Here, they are probably more a nuisance than a danger, but, in France there is a huge outcry from fish-farmers at what is seen by them and by anglers as almost a plague. So you gather from reading a recent issue of Le Chasseur Franca is, a sporting, gardening and generally outdoors magazine, which asked its readers to give a headcount for their area.
It seems that there may be at times, as many as 100,000 cormorants on the lakes and rivers of France all consuming what humans think should be human food. A striking example of cormorant-power or depredation may be seen in an area of eastern France, Les Dombes, where there is a concentration of lakes and fish-ponds and bird-watching parkland. Licenses for slaughter for a specific number of the birds may be issued by individual governments or other authorities but in this area Jean-Luc Payet-Pigeon, president of the syndicate that operates the fish-farm complex, runs a campaign that goes beyond the permissible.
In 1996 the syndicate shot more than a thousand of the birds. Well over their quota, and it appears that the local officialdom stands over them. Jean-Luc says that ten years ago you would hardly see a cormorant in the area. Now there are 2,000. It is estimated that they eat at least about a pound weight of fish per day each. (More surely?) And that adds up, he says, to 150 to 200 tonnes of fish disappearing annually from their ponds. That could be a loss of ten million francs. In ten years, he says, production had gone down by at least 60 per cent. In some cases much more.
They tried scare tactics at first blank rounds fired, even at night with infra-red sights. No good. They can't easily embark on a campaign of wrecking nests. The ecologists would be after them. And yet, he believes, that shooting them will only be effective over ten years. But they have one more argument. It seems possible that the cormorant could be proved to be a carrier of the fowl-pest Newcastle Disease. That would make everyone jump to action. flow do our fish-farmers stand with the cormorant?