NEW YORK -- "Protected Birds Are Back, With a Vengeance: Cormorants Take Over, Making Some Enemies." This headline in the New York Times earlier this month, inset in a photo showing a few black birds atop a tree, struck me with the thought: So it has come to pass. Hadn't the same daily some years back carried a story very different in content and tone, which nonetheless portended this outcome?
It indeed had, seven years ago, as I quickly confirmed. With the headline "A Slaughter of Cormorants in Angler Country," the Aug. 1, 1998, story had told the reader of a "massacre" of double-crested cormorants on the uninhabited Little Galloo Island on Lake Ontario, which "left 840 birds dead and more than 100 others injured [and] transformed the local issue into an extraordinary environmental crime."
As the newsletter "The Federal Wildlife Officer" put it one summer later, "the shotgun slayings," which were the result of the conflict between local fishermen and the birds, "are considered by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS) to be one of the largest mass killings ever of a species protected by federal laws."