Double Crested Cormorants!!!!!!  

Scenes such as shown in the video above are becoming increasingly familiar to anglers in the great Lakes and usually generate quite an emotional reaction.   As with most emotional reactions, they are often based on incomplete, inaccurate or not based on actual fact.

Are Cormorants a threat to our eco-system and possibly our fishery? YES!  Is shooting them all the answer (or even feasible?) PROBABLY NOT!   To loosely paraphrase an old military axiom,  "to defeat an enemy, you must first know them" (or something like that)!

To control the problem, we first must understand it!!  All of the emotions, petitions, PowerPoint presentations, etc., are going to accomplish very little if we don't know our "enemy".

Unfortunately, the cormorant issues, like most environmental issues, are not as simple as we'd like them to be. As we've learned the hard way, Nature requires a very delicate balance between species that must be maintained or we often just create more problems!

The purpose of this page is NOT to give you the answers but rather to point you to available information that will help you to form your own opinions, based on verifiable facts and information.  There is a lot of info floating around, some good, some bad.  The following links will let you look at the problem from various perspectives and, hopefully, provide you with useful information.

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