Tweeters:

I think it's unfortunate that the Caspian Terns are being made out as
villians in their role as smolt predators at the mouth of the Columbia
River. I read in the paper where Sen. Gorton advocated "just dredging that
island out of existence" - it is only, possibly the largest Caspian Tern
breeding colony in North America! A lot of this, I think, is just to deflect
attention to the real problem - dams - and the real villains - us!

I'm a bit leary of this plan to move the colony to another island west of
the current colony on the basis of 1 study and w/ apparentley very little in
the way of an environmental impact study. What if there is something other
than prey availabilty that makes the East Rice Island attractive? Also I
would want to know what was the pre-tern smolt mortality, the natural ocean
mortality, etc. Perhaps in some way the terns are helping the surviving
smolts by reducing competition. Who knows? Just goes to show what happens
when we start messing around with things.

In any case, nobody has addressed the fact that smolt from healthy Columbia
R. runs have apparentley been unaffected by the terns (so far). It could be
argued that since the island is artificial, the tern colony is artificially
large, but this could have been forseen. But the U.S. Army Corps created the
mess in the first place so they need to fix it w/o negatively impacting the
terns that have been attracted to the area.

Thanks, Charles.
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Charles E. Swift
charless at umich.edu
Moscow, Idaho
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