ODFW Kills Seabirds Preying on Threatened Salmon: Birds Love Tasty Fish, Too

We love salmon, so are we really surprised that birds love it too? Now, though, we're fighting for our fish. The Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife has recently expanded an area where it's killing cormorants in order to see if they are the cause of the recent declines in protected young salmon.

Cormorants are seabirds, consisting of about 40 different species. They range in size from the Pygmy Cormorant, which is only about 18 inches long, to the Flightless Cormorant, which is about 40 inches. They feast on fish, eels and water snakes, which is what has prompted the current culling of the population to protect the salmon.

Currently, Oregon is expanding a study that was started last year into how many salmon cormorants are eating from the Tillamook estuary into the Umpqua and Rogue estuaries. Officials can technically shoot 50 of the birds a year on each of the estuaries through March 2015.

Yet 50 isn't much when you look at the numbers. About 4,000 of these birds nest on the Oregon Coast each year, and each bird can eat up to two pounds of fish per day. Cormorant population numbers have boomed and over the years, they have expanded inland along certain rivers, including the Rogue.

The problem is that the fish being eaten are threatened, which means that an excessive amount of birds could spell dire consequences for the salmon. Further complicating matters is the fact that the birds themselves are federally protected under the Migratory Bird Treaty Act, which means that quite a few legal hurdles need to be jumped before any of them can be culled.

That doesn't mean that volunteers don't have other methods of deterring the birds. When wild and hatchery coho smolts migrate to the ocean in April and May, volunteers drive at birds in small boats while occasionally firing fireworks toward them. The ODFW oversees this "hazing" and even pays for the boat fuel.

The real fish in danger, though, are the chinook salmon in the fall. Many fledglings and immature transient birds show up just as the chinook make their way downstream, according to OPB.

Whether or not culling the cormorants will do any good remains to be seen. Currently, volunteers are planning on continuing to haze the birds to prevent them from eating too many fish.