The U.S. government is planning to kill about 11,000 double-crested cormorants over the next few years in order to protect salmon and steelhead populations in Oregon, revealed the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.
On Friday, Feb. 6, the Army Corps released the final Environment Impact Statement (EIS), which detailed information about reducing the population of cormorants in the East Sand Island of Oregon.
The plan is still waiting for a final decision. If the plan gets a green light, then state officials will be killing birds and pouring oil over the nests, techniques used to stop the hatching process of chicks.
Diana Fredlund, spokesperson for the Army Corps, said that the plan for killing 11,000 birds is a difficult decision but is an alternative to killing 18,000 cormorants by 2018.
"We are trying to balance the salmon and steelhead versus the birds. It's very difficult to find the right answer and so it's taken us a long time. We've had a lot of experts working on it," said Fredlund.
The corps looked at other alternatives, such as hazing the cormorants so they move to another place. However, Fredlund thinks the move would not have fixed the problem but just shifted the problem from one place to the other.
The government has made plans to kill birds after the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) released a Biological Opinion in 2014, which called for reducing the population of birds from the 13,000 existing pairs to below 6,000 by 2018.
According to government officials, these birds eat juvenile salmon, which is a risk to the population of the fish. The Endangered Species Act has also listed juvenile salmon, as well as steelhead, as endangered and threatened.
However, the Audubon Society believes that the actual threat to the population of salmon in the Oregon region is the loss of natural habitat and not the increasing number of birds. The Audubon Society also aims to challenge the Army Corps' plan of culling thousands of birds.
The federal plan includes not only culling 11,000 birds but also calls for destroying about 26,000 bird nests in the region.
The Army Corps officials estimate that since 1989, cormorants on East Sand Island have consumed around 11 million steelhead trout and salmon yearly, which accounts for about 7 percent of juvenile steelhead that travel from East Sand Island to the ocean.
