Double-crested cormorants finally find a friend

If you haven’t renewed your fishing license yet, yours is expired. You need to get a new one right away so you get out there before all the fish are gone.

A decade ago, every angler in Michigan was certain that double-crested cormorants were ruining the fisheries on lakes Huron and Michigan and lots of inland lakes as well. Double-crested cormorants are ugly, long-necked black birds with prodigious appetites for fish. By some estimates, adult cormorants can consume a pound to a pound and a half of fish every day.

Lake Huron cormorants are blamed for eating yellow perch, smallmouth bass, an occasional walleye and all those salmon that get pumped out the back of hatchery trucks. Their favorite snack, though, is the alewife.

So it may be that the cormorants got blamed for eating all the game fish when what was really happening was the beginning of the alewife crash that stood the entire Lake Huron fishery on its head. But cormorants are easy to blame. They form huge colonies, appear to eat everything in site, and then spread what’s left over after digestion all over the landscape.

Despite that, the Department of Natural Resources listened to anglers’ concerns about cormorants and took them to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. Fish and Wildlife had heard it before, although first from fish farmers, and gave states — including Michigan — permission to reduce cormorant populations.

Michigan spends about $100,000 a year killing between 15,000 and 20,000 a year.

The problem is that double-crested cormorants have a history.

In the 1960s and 70s, there were no cormorants in Michigan. In 1976, double-crested cormorants were added to the state endangered species list as “probably extirpated” — wiped out, in other words.

They weren’t doing much better anywhere else, mainly because of pesticide pollution and other environmental factors, and so ended up on the federal government’s list of endangered and protected species.

That means, a federal judge decided this week, that the Fish and Wildlife Service can’t give anyone permission to shoot them, whether anyone believes they’re eating all the yellow perch or not.

That’s because, U.S. District Judge John D. Bates wrote, believing isn’t enough. The National Environmental Protection Act, he said, requires management decisions for endangered species to be based on science, not the angry finger-pointing of frustrated anglers looking for somebody to blame.

Before anyone gets to take pot shots at an endangered species, Fish and Wildlife needs to gather scientific evidence and determine the long-range environmental effects and possible alternatives to any management plan. The agency told the judge it didn’t have the resources to commit to that research. The judge told the agency that was no excuse.

That excuse, he added, would allow any government agency at any level to ignore any law it wanted, only beginning with NEPA.

Judge Bates issued his ruling in a suit brought by Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility. PEER is a well-respected national advocacy group of public sector scientists and boots-on-the-ground conservation and environmental workers whose purpose is to keep their bosses focused on their mission.

PEER’s lawyer, Laura Dumais, said in a statement Wednesday, “The service can no longer Xerox forward stale and unsupported practices simply because it will not take the time to consider alternatives.”

I suspect this ruling in favor of actual science isn’t going to end with double-crested cormorants.

Contact Michael Eckert at meckert@gannett.com, (810) 989-6264, on Facebook @michaeleckert or on Twitter @michaeleckert.