The story implied that anglers were shooting cormorants on a large scale and that large numbers more needed to be shot; that organised bands of militants were roaming the countryside blasting at every black bird in sight and that many of their fellows condoned it. The whole episode was a text-book example of how not to handle an emotive issue and, not surprisingly, a national outcry resulted. Many of our fellow-conservationists rightly deplored it. Politicians of varying hues leapt on the bandwagon. Animal rights extremists whipped up the horses. The entire sport, along with its furious and hapless spokesmen, was put on the back foot.
Then the inevitable happened. The media spotlight fell onto something else and the row calmed down. But it left dreadful damage behind. Those images and headlines and that whippedup outcry had gone deep into the public psyche. In the minds of many, the image of angling as a harmless and rather dotty pursuit had been tarnished. We are continuing to live with the consequences. In a climate in which, increasingly, all creatures are seen as fellow passengers on planet earth, angling – given the demise of foxhunting – is now in the sights.
It was all so short-sighted and unnecessary. The issue is not that cormorants do great damage – there is no doubt that, locally, they do – but how best the problem might be tackled. If we are to make real progress on this, as on other sensitive issues, rants must be avoided and loudly condemned when they occur. We need to deal with the world as it exists and not as we would like it to be. We need to deal with facts. Here, in relation to cormorants, are a few.
First, there is no doubt that cormorant numbers are rising rapidly. By the year 2000 it was estimated that there were up to half a million birds in Europe, of which around 15,000 nested in Britain, many of them inland. This indigenous population was even then being steadily supplemented by an influx of birds from the mainland. These incomers boosted the number of birds overwintering here to around 25,000. Around 10,000 of these birds wintered inland and it was recognised that even birds living on the coasts will fly many miles inland to find food. Cormorant numbers have gone on rising ever since. There are single colonies of many hundred of birds close to some of our biggest lakes.
A range of factors is likely to be involved in this population growth. The first is that the free control of cormorants was banned under the Wildlife and Countryside Act of 1981, a piece of uk legislation giving effect to the European Union’s Birds Directive. Other factors include the fishing-out by commercial boats of inshore waters where cormorants would normally hunt; the creation of more and more self-stocking reservoirs and lakes as a result of gravel extraction and the like; a growth in the numbers of waters artificially stocked with trout both for food and for sport; a growth in the numbers of heavily stocked commercial coarse fisheries and a reduction in poisons like ddt in the food chain which, in the past, have kept cormorant numbers down.
What has it all meant for anglers? It has given us two problems. The first is the sheer tonnage of fish that cormorants eat. The second is the vast number of fish that the birds injure and kill but do not eat.
At the most conservative estimate (conservative estimates are best because exaggeration simply undermines our case) the average cormorant eats 1lb of fish a day, which means that in a year six birds will eat one ton, 600 birds will eat 100 tons, 6,000 birds will eat 1,000 tons. While grossing up figures gives staggering totals, the net impact of this predation is not easy to calculate, not least because no-one knows what freshwater fish populations are, overall. What we can assume, however, is that the birds will get their food from the easiest places (most likely small, heavily stocked waters of the kind anglers have created); and what we know is that the damage comes in the particular, not the general – that is, that the damage done to individual fisheries, whatever is happening to fisheries at large, can be dire.
But that is only part of it. While natural mortalities in fish stocks, spawning failures, predation by other creatures and the like all have to go into the negative mix, so do all those fish not eaten but fatally injured by cormorants. When hunting, cormorants often behave like pack animals or sharks: they seem to go into a feeding frenzy. Then, anglers’ concerns become even more clear. Cormorants have large, sharp, hooked bills and will chase most fish that swim, other than the very largest. The injuries they inflict are quite unmistakable – lines across the sides of a fish showing where the bill has taken hold and one or more short, deep slashes, usually in the belly, where the bill hook has gone in. Fish injured in this way but not eaten, are likely to die quickly from their injuries or to die later from disease.
I can speak of it all personally. For some seasons, many of the fish I have been catching from my local river have shown signs of cormorant damage. I have caught many trout weighing around 3lbs that have had cormorant wounds across their flanks, indicating that they had been attacked by birds even though the birds could not cope with their size. One of the biggest grayling I have ever caught – it came from a stream so small and overgrown I cannot imagine how a cormorant got into it – weighed 2lbs 13oz and had cormorant marks across its sides. On another river I found a 6lbs salmon kelt dying in the margins, with cormorant slashes deep in its gut. A fish farmer I know was able to walk right up to one bird because it had so gorged on small trout that it could not take off.
Many a regular angler has similar stories to tell. There is no doubt that cormorants are not just one more big bird. In large numbers they are an obvious menace to waters within flying distance, whatever statistical evidence might currently be lacking.
Politics, however, is the art of the possible. If the birds cannot be fully controlled – and under both British and European law they cannot – then anglers and those who represent them must make the best use of circumstances as they stand. This is what angling’s representative bodies have been doing, with some limited success. Thanks to their efforts, where significant damage to a fishery can be proven, a licence to shoot a small number of birds as a means of scaring away others (albeit only to make them fly to someone else’s water nearby) can now be obtained.
To gain further concessions will take a steady accumulation of credible case histories, wider research (when did researchers ever recommend less?), bridge-building with other conservation groups, reasoned explanation of our concerns to them, to the public and to the politicians who hold the levers of power and, not least, education of the angling community itself.
An important part of this effort must be to win public recognition of the fact that our environment needs to be seen in the round. Specifically, we need acknowledgement of two points. The first is that, of necessity, we have created on our island a landscape that is wholly artificial – and hence everything within it needs to be managed to maintain balances that, for better or worse, we have long since upset in our search for food, shelter and diversion. The second is conscious acknowledgment that, although they may not be as cuddly or as photogenic as their furred and feathered friends, fish are a part in our wildlife heritage and have a place in that wider equation, too.
In the meantime, any relief from cormorants that can be achieved – tweaks to legislation here, alleviations there – are likely to fall short of what anglers would like to see. High bird numbers, and the problems that come with them, are here for years to come.
They will be around longer – and maybe longer than angling itself – if the hotheads have their way.
I READ somewhere that more books have been written about angling than about any other subject except mathematics. I have no idea who made the calculation, but it was probably a mathematician – and not a very good one, at that.
Even so, there are many thousands of angling books in print and they have come in all guises: factual books, fishing guides and diaries, reminiscences, anthologies like this. A few, among the very best, break new ground – not an easy thing to do in this ancient sport. Others, also among the best, have a literary quality that makes them timeless. Lots, alas, add only