Shooting Cormorants and Goosanders

Simon,  I think you may get a lot of comments (I hope constructive comments) but people on this site should know that your website is the one that has put out this announcement and has commented on it.

I will not be taking part because I am occasionally employed in monitoring breaches of the current licences and it would be wrong of me to make a comment.

Last week these three were having a field day, there was another 73 in the trees waiting their turn in between feeds, lovely to watch:)

Unknown said:

Last week these three were having a field day, there was another 73 in the trees waiting their turn in between feeds, lovely to watch:)

Unless you are an angler of course,then you start priming your musket !!

OK, so I know I have poked a wasp nest here - but I have hundreds of my members on my forum wanting a cull and I need to present them with the other side of the argument (constructively please)...

Lets not argue about anglers leaving litter / line as that is unforgivable and most anglers do alot to clean up the lakes and rivers - it is an uneducated few that cause the problems, but that is true about many groups of people.

Back to the main point, the cormorants have been driven inland due to lack of natural resources - these are sea birds are they not??

As for shooting them - I would much rather scare them off but they are clever and if you let on onto a fishery then within a week you could quite easily have 10 or more on there. They then can decimate the place in a few days.... fish cost anywhere between £4 and £17 a pound dependant on the species so if a cormorant eats between 1 and 3lbs of fish a day its not easy to see this as getting expensive. Then if you just leave them on the fishery you have no fish left very quickly and no income as no anglers want to come.

Someone above made the point that 'anglers only want to catch big fish anyway' - well if there are no small fish left to grow into big fish then what happens in the future!

Where these birds are left unchecked rivers are being emptied and then where will we be.

The point is this - I would never dream of shooting a heron or kingfisher but allowing cormorants unchecked is the same as releasing a pack of lions into a field of sheep! These are killing machines and their numbers are out of control - that is why we need something to be done and quickly.

As a matter of interest for you guys I am a fishery owner, I dug my 3 acre lake 4 years ago, it has breeding geese, two kingfishers, barn owls, little owls, loads of swifts, kestrels, rooks, herons, ducks, swans plus many more..... I just dont want any cormorants on there!

I'm going to stick my neck out a little here. I'm an avid fly fisherman. Part of this is to enjoy being outside and at one so to speak with nature. The club I belong to looks after a stretch of chalk stream for both fish and other wildlife. Without us it would fall into rack and ruin. We've won awards from the local wildlife trust for our work. The general public leave all sorts of litter and detritus which we clear up. They also destroy the habitat creating structures we build. So tarring all anglers with the same brush is a bit of a cheap shot.

With regards to Cormorant and Goosanders I can understand the frustrations of fishery owners however in my experince the damage they do to fish stocks tends to be overstated. There are also measure that can be taken to minimise this.

In certain cases they can however be destructive but, again in my experience this tends to be in man-made environments where overstocking of a fishery means an easy meal for the birds.

I tend to think that rivers or lakes that suffer are under a multiple pronged attack from larger environmental issues and Cormorants are easy to blame as they're the most obvious and visible.

Like those on this forum who call for the controlling of Magpies and Crows I will never advocate any such drastic measures unless backed up by peer reviewed, solid scientific evidence.

Mr Fishing.  Simon I am now going to say something as it is a bit odd for you to say you have hundreds of people on your forum calling for a cull.  I have looked at the forum you highlight above and there is only one comment on there saying ' about time' and that comment is from yourself.

Seaman.  You have referred to the general licence and how the quota would be checked.  The changing to a general (open) licence would mean there is no quota and the only restrictions would be the normal ones that apply as they do for crows etc.

Dear Bob,

The Cormorant issue has been discussed many times and on numerous threads on TALKANGLING over the years on our forum - I am not meaning there are 100's of comments on the particular thread to which you refer. But thanks for trying to discredit me and BTW above you claimed you were not going to get involved. TalkAngling is one of the busiest angling forums in the UK and I am trying to get as much opinion as possible from both sides of the fence - I will of course put a link to this thread on TA.

Once all the issues are exposed then I hope that your members will also support a cull.

Here is one such discussion thread -:

www.talkangling.co.uk/.../32453-lets-get-rid-cormorants.html

It's good to see that many of the posters on the 'Let's get rid of Cormorants' thread on the Talk Angling forum have objected to the idea that this native species should be eradicated from the UK! The second poster on that thread pretty much articulates my feelings on the subject when he says 'You can't introduce a food source for nature, and then baulk when nature does its thing by eating it.'

Constructive critiscism, and I'm not being flippant

1> Suggest all anglers go vegetarian

2> Resulting also in less damage to the mouths of fish causing them less duress if there is such a thing, because none of us are fish we would never know what pain is inflicted