October 7, 1997, New York Times


A Taste for Catfish Lands a Bird in Trouble



By LES LINE

Hardly anybody loves the double-crested cormorant. Least of all
fishermen, who since Colonial days have tended to view these
large, greenish-black, water birds with hostility in the belief that they
consume tremendous quantities of commercial and game fish. Until the
early 1960s, fishermen on the Great Lakes in Canada, with official
acquiescence, destroyed cormorant colonies by killing the adult birds
with
shotguns and smashing their eggs.

The double-crested cormorant, also known as the crow-duck, is a
protected species in the United States. But in a new twist to an old
conflict, the fairly recent popularity of catfish on the American
restaurant
menu and dinner table has led to a proposal by the federal Fish and
Wildlife Service to allow fish farmers in many states to kill unlimited
numbers of the birds.

The service is expected to make a decision on adopting the proposal later
this year.

The soaring demand for catfish fillets has created a fish-farming boom in
the South, where double-crested cormorants migrate in winter. In
Mississippi alone, more than 100,000 acres of Delta land is dedicated to
catfish production. These large, shallow ponds, crammed with up to
60,000 catfish an acre, are highly visible from the air and are magnets
for
fish-eating birds, especially cormorants.

Biologists say this catfish cornucopia has contributed significantly to a
cormorant population explosion in recent years, which has in turn led to
increased predation on fish stocks. Growers say they are losing millions
of
dollars' worth of catfish each year to the birds, and they demand relief.


"Nobody is in favor of massacring the birds," said Louie Thompson, who
raises catfish fingerlings on 350 acres of ponds near Thornton, Miss.
"But
we want a little more latitude to protect our crops." Thornton, who is
president of the Catfish Farmers of Mississippi, said that several
thousand
cormorants roosted in cypress trees on an oxbow of the Yazoo River
near his farm. "We've been able to reduce our losses by harassing the
roosts," he said, "but it's expensive to keep running them off all winter
long."

Because the species is protected, catfish growers currently need permits
from the Fish and Wildlife Service to shoot a limited number of
cormorants -- a maximum of 50 a year in Thornton's case -- and they
must report the number of birds killed. Those requirements would be
lifted by the proposed order.

>From 4,000 to 8,000 cormorants are shot every year by fish farmers in
the South with no noticeable impact on the wintering population, said Dr.
John Trapp, a biologist with the Migratory Bird Management Office of
the Fish and Wildlife Service. He wrote in The Federal Register that the
rule change "is expected to result in only a modest increase in the
number
of double-crested cormorants taken at aquaculture facilities."

Thornton agreed with that. "They're smart birds," he said. "They get wary
of people and guns pretty quickly."

The highest take of cormorants under the relaxed rules, Trapp projected,
would be around 92,000 birds a year, or 5 percent to 10 percent of the
continental population. "This will be more than offset by the recruitment
of
young birds into the population," he said.

In a letter to the Fish and Wildlife Service, Jim Ekstrom, president of
the
National Aquaculture Association, said programs "at the farm level are
inherently limited in their ability to control burgeoning cormorant
populations." Ekstrom, who owns a striped bass farm in El Campo,
Texas, said the agency also "must implement or supervise a program of
roost dispersal and even the destruction of cormorant nests and eggs."

But conservation groups say that the depredation order would set a
dangerous precedent. It is intended, in large part, to ease an
administrative and budgetary burden for the fish and wildlife agency,
which keeps track of the permits and the number of birds killed, the
groups say.

Kathleen Rogers, the wildlife counsel for the National Audubon Society,
in Washington, said: "We recognize there is a problem in five states, but
to issue aquaculturists a blanket permit to kill as many cormorants as
they
want, everywhere but in 15 Western states, is a strange solution. The
punishment doesn't fit the crime."

Ms. Rogers said the problem could be addressed by issuing local permits
that were limited to months when cormorants were likely to cause
abnormal economic losses to catfish growers.

The bird at the center of the dispute is the most common of six species
of
cormorants that breed in North America, and it is the only one found
around inland freshwater lakes and rivers. Named for the tufts of white
feathers that appear on its head in spring, the double-crested cormorant
is
typically seen perched on rocks or pilings with its wings spread to dry,
or
riding low in the water, with its head and neck exposed like a
submarine's
periscope.

In North America, the double-crested cormorant nests from the Pacific
coast of southwest Alaska to the Atlantic coast of Newfoundland and
south to the Gulf of Mexico, but 61 percent of the breeding population is
concentrated in the northern prairie states and provinces, especially the
large lakes of Manitoba, and along the Great Lakes. About 26 percent of
the population breeds in Canada's Maritime Provinces and Maine. In fall,
thousands of birds from this 1,860-mile-wide expanse of breeding range
funnel into the heart of the catfish farming industry, at the confluence
of the
Arkansas and Mississippi Rivers.

Relentless persecution and the loss of natural wetlands to agriculture
kept
double-crested cormorant numbers low until laws protecting the birds
were passed early in this century and the federal government went on a
dam-building binge, creating huge lakes stocked with fish. The interior
cormorant population began an eastward expansion through the Great
Lakes in 1913 and reached the upper St. Lawrence River by 1945, only
to be devastated by the effects of DDT and other toxic chemicals after
World War II.

But in the 1970s, with DDT banned and the catfish industry expanding in
the birds' wintering grounds, the number of cormorants exploded. The
population on the Great Lakes alone increased 300-fold between 1973
and 1993, a period when the number of catfish farms in Mississippi,
Alabama, Arkansas, and Louisiana grew to 1,193. In 1982, there were
794 such farms. (In 1993, 496 million pounds of live catfish, worth $353
million, were delivered to processing plants.) Recent estimates of the
total
double-crested cormorant population in North America range from 1
million to 2 million birds.

An adult cormorant weighs about 4 pounds and will eat a pound of fish a
day, but studies have repeatedly shown that in natural circumstances, the
birds feed largely on small, noncommercial species like alewives. But a
Mississippi Delta catfish farm with as many as 1,000 acres of ponds is a
decidedly unnatural environment. The typical catfish pond is a 20-acre
rectangle side by side with other ponds, and Trapp, of the Fish and
Wildlife Service, wrote that "the practice of using large ponds developed
in the 1970s, when cormorant numbers were low."

Because the ponds are large and close together, Trapp explained, it
would be difficult to cover them with nets to keep out the birds.

Trapp said that cormorants consumed an estimated 18 million to 20
million catfish, mostly fingerlings, on the Delta in winter, or about 4
percent of the total. But he emphasized that a number of factors
influenced the level of cormorant predation, like the abundance of
natural
fish populations in the area.

"It is not uncommon for many fish farmers in a region to suffer little or
no
economic damage from cormorants, while a few farmers experience
exceptionally high losses," he wrote.

Ekstrom, of the National Aquaculture Association, said the proposed
order to allow the killing of cormorants by fish farmers -- as well as by
growers of other food fish, bait fish, and decorative species, like koi
-- "is
vital to our industry."

But conservationists contend that the proposed order would discourage
fish farmers from investing in long-term solutions to the problem of bird
predators. Ms. Rogers, of the National Audubon Society, said: "Farmers
who are investing in new facilities should design ponds that can
accommodate net structures, and the Fish and Wildlife Service should
work with aquaculturists to develop non-lethal control methods."