If cormorants aren't actually bad for the ecosystem, can we bear to let them exist?

I remember when the cormorants came back. It was the mid 1990s. People around our Georgian Bay cottage said the black waterbirds with the long, snake-like necks were an invasive species eating the perch we like to catch. There was talk about oiling their eggs to limit the population.

Since then, double-crested cormorants have become a common sight on our stretch of the bay and elsewhere in cottage country, part of the familiar fauna, mistaken from a distance for the loons with whom they share a love of fish. But, it turns out, they’re not invasive after all. Double-crested cormorants are native to Ontario. The population declined dramatically in the 1960s and ’70s because toxic chemicals, such as DDT (dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane), in the ecosystem thinned the shell of their eggs and led to reproductive failure. The cormorant’s reappearance coincided with new regulations on the use and production of DDT and other pesticides.

Wild Profile: Meet the double-crested cormorant

What’s more, scientists don’t believe the birds are having a measurable impact on native fish populations. In fact, biologists consider their recovery in this area to be one of the most underrated environmental success stories of the last half century.

Yet cormorants remain reviled by some. Since 2020 in Ontario, they’re subject to a government-sanctioned hunt. It came into effect, according to the Ministry of Natural Resources and Forestry, “in response to concerns expressed by groups (commercial fishing industry, property owners) and individuals that cormorants have been detrimental to fish populations, island forest habitats, other species, and aesthetics.” Anyone with a shotgun and a small game license can shoot 15 cormorants a day in the September 15 to December 31 hunting season, so long as they pick up and dispose of the birds. The regulations say cormorants are game birds, but they’re widely considered inedible, with tough, fishy-tasting meat that may yet be filled with toxic chemicals.

So how do we make sense of why a native bird whose resurgence we should be celebrating has become the subject of a hunt? And what does this paradox say about the environment, cottage country, and us?

This isn’t the first time cormorants have been the target of hate. Indeed, the birds have been vilified for centuries in story and song. Shakespeare used the cormorant as a metaphor for greed in four of his famous plays. In John Milton’s epic poem, “Paradise Lost,” Satan appears disguised as a cormorant. More recently, a young Ralph Fiennes contributed to the beleaguered bird’s bad rap, appearing in a 1993 horror film called The Cormorant, in which a violent pet bird may or may not be possessed by Fiennes’ evil uncle.

So it’s hardly surprising that the cormorant’s reputation preceded them to cottage country. In the annals of the Environmental Registry of Ontario where cottagers and other stakeholders recorded their thoughts on the 2018–2019 government proposal for a hunting season, the divisions were stark. “Radical cormorant- haters have already attacked colonies under cover of night, destroying nests, stomping on chicks, and killing adults,” one correspondent claimed. A longtime Killbear-area cottager wrote, “There are no fish in Georgian Bay to catch, and I blame the cormorants.”

It’s true that cormorants are prodigious eaters, the adults consuming, by some accounts, a pound of fish per day, diving up to 30 metres below the surface in their search. They live in colonies that range from a few couples to the 14,000 nesting pairs that make their home in Toronto’s lakeside Tommy Thompson Park. They like to build their nest in any available tree near the water, but also nest on the ground, and because their feces are acidic, the foliage and sometimes trees themselves can be damaged. Cormorants also have a tendency to strike an eerie, vampire- like pose after swimming, their black wings outstretched to dry their flight feathers. They do not have a beautiful song—instead, their call has been memorably described by professor Richard J. King, author of The Devil’s Cormorant: A Natural History, as “a hiss or a piggy grunt, something like the creak of an old door hinge.”

Liz Phillips, a Bay of Islands cottager and the president of the Georgian Bay Association (GBA) board, says cormorants “don’t have good PR…we see this with certain creatures. We’re happy protecting the fuzzy, cute ones, but not so good about getting behind the less cuddly ones.”

The GBA, scientists, and many other organizations pushed back against the hunt proposal, citing a lack of evidence that cormorants are significantly affecting the sport fish population. Instead, they argued, cormorants are mostly eating small, invasive species, such as alewife and round goby, a diet that is actually beneficial to the ecosystem. And, in the context of the whole province, the damage to trees and habitat is minimal, an aesthetic concern rather than an environmental one.

“We think it’s an idiotic idea, which has been dreamed up based on inaccurate perceptions of what cormorants do to the ecosystem,” then-GBA executive director Rupert Kindersley told CBC Radio in 2020, when the hunt first came into effect.

The ministry responded to critics by reducing the proposed hunting season (it was originally slated to begin in March) and cutting the daily limit from 50 to 15 birds. It also established a requirement for hunters to retrieve the birds they kill.

By that time, cottagers and residents on Big Rideau Lake, Ont., had been monitoring the cormorant population on the lake for many years. The smell near some of the small island colonies could get very strong in certain winds, and people were concerned about the impact of guano entering the water system (the fear of phosphorus pollution was subsequently allayed by research from the Rideau Valley Conservation Authority). Others, including retired wildlife biologist Buzz Boles, spoke out on behalf of the birds. “Cormorants have a very special place in the ecology of this lake,” he says. In fact, he called the hunt an “open slaughter,” and on opening day in fall 2020, then– 74-year-old Boles donned a bright orange jacket and hat and climbed one of the island’s tallest trees to protest the hunt. He sat up there from 3 a.m. to 4 p.m.: “I told the media, my message to the government is this: ‘Where is the data that justifies this hunt?’ ”

Nearly five years on, Boles says the cormorant population on Big Rideau Lake—both resident birds and migratory ones—has declined dramatically. “I go out with another person three or four times a summer to count,” he says. “There are no nests at all, and the resident birds are down to about 20 from more than 100. I used to see thousands of migratory cormorants in the mid-to late-summer, and this year, we counted just 100 to 150 birds.”

Gail Fraser, a York University biologist and professor who’s been studying cormorants since 2006, calls Ontario’s hunt a “complete mismanagement of the population. There are no population targets set. The government has never said how many they want or are willing to tolerate being killed in the province. Plus, there is very little monitoring of what is actually being taken.”

The MNRF reports that it has been keeping track of the cormorant population since 2019. Its most recent count is from 2021—just a year after the hunt began, when it recorded “an estimated 126,000 breeding cormorants across 142 active colony sites surveyed in Ontario…” The ministry maintains: “At current levels of hunter interest and harvest, there is little potential for the hunt to negatively impact cormorant numbers at the provincial scale.”

Still, Fraser says, a hunt is a crude way to control the birds. She points to the U.S., where the Fish and Wildlife Service used population modelling to decide how to manage cormorants sustainably. “They determined hunting was not the best way to reduce numbers because it goes against fundamental conservation principles,” she says.

Instead, when cormorants cause damage in specific locations, the service recommends non-lethal methods of control (removing or breaking up nests, noise making, etc.), and will issue permits allowing killing or capture of the birds if such efforts prove insufficient.

“We shouldn’t be taking a robust wildlife population for granted—things can change very quickly,” says Fraser. She blames complaints about cormorants in part on ecological illiteracy. “Ecosystems are very complex. There are lots of reasons that fish may or may not be prevalent in a particular area. The lakes have changed a lot over the years, and much of it is caused by humans,” she says.

“Cormorants are a scapegoat.” She also points to the false perception of the bird’s abundance as “unnatural” since a generation of cottagers and Ontarians didn’t grow up with them.

Last fall, Phillips says, the GBA renewed its campaign against the hunt. “We just don’t think hunting is necessary to control the cormorant population. We’ve had complaints from our members about hunters leaving carcasses in the water. We started hearing about it on Facebook. Then one of our board members found a handful of dead cormorants in the Honey Harbour area.”

Boles says he’s also seen dead cormorants on Big Rideau Lake and spoken to others who’ve found carcasses that have not been buried or taken to the dump—an offense that carries a fine of $150.

For me, the debate calls to mind the notion of “wildlife acceptance capacity,” a concept in wildlife management circles that attempts to understand human-creature conflict and measure the shifting tolerance people have for the animals and birds in their midst. In other words, when and why do humans stop being okay with sharing the environment with particular wildlife? The answer, most often, is when they begin to interfere with our activities or otherwise inconvenience us. In large part, we consider our needs, wants, and aesthetic preferences more important than the creatures with whom we live.

“Cormorants are not beautiful birds,” says Phillips. “And the environment that they create is not always beautiful. They are a little smelly. But we have to learn to live with the natural behaviour of the wildlife that is resilient enough to be able to survive in what is such a human-dominated environment.”

Fraser suggests it’s also worth acknowledging that cormorants contribute to the health of the ecosystem, as a predator eating invasive fish species and as prey for the once-endangered bald eagle population that is recovering in this province. And while cormorant poop does kill trees, this also creates habitat for other ground-nesting birds, such as herring gulls and ring-billed gulls.

Maybe what we need instead of a hunt is a rethink—testing the limits of our wildlife acceptance capacity. Last summer, I made the effort to get to know the cormorants on our bay, kayaking as close as possible to watch them fishing or drying their wings on a nearby shoal. I discovered that cormorants are not the ugly, greedy vampires of folklore and collective memory. In fact, they are quite extraordinary birds whose feathers can be a kind of iridescent dark blue-green, sleek and glossy when wet. They have orangey-yellow skin around their face, bill, and cheek, and their eyes are a startling aquamarine or turquoise, with an unusual scalloped ring around the edge. If you spot an adult cormorant with its bill open, you might also notice its mouth is bright blue inside. During mating season, adults of both sexes develop their eponymous crest, and the delicate feather fringe blows in the wind, making them look alternately comedic and sophisticated, like a lady at the racetrack with a fascinator pinned to her hair.

Cormorants, I’ve also learned, are excellent parents, rarely leaving their chicks alone, even tending to them briefly after they fledge. They are environmental artists of a sort too, using the detritus of humans to build their nests. Fraser and her colleagues find baseball hats and toothbrushes, ballerinas from cake decorations, even sunglasses among the nesting material—a revealing reminder of our own ecological footprint.

It’s like getting to know a person you disagree with. The more you know about them, their motivations and interests, their history and experiences, the harder it is to see them as one-dimensional caricatures. Maybe it’s not cormorants that need to change, but humans who must reimagine what it is to coexist.

This article was originally published in the Mar/Apr ’25 issue of Cottage Life.

If cormorants aren’t actually bad for the ecosystem, can we bear to let them exist?

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