ASTORIA, Ore. — August 18, 2014 — The salmon here in the Columbia River, nearly driven to extinction by hydroelectric dams a quarter century ago, have been increasing in number — a fact not lost on the birds that like to eat them. These now flock by the thousands each spring to the river’s mouth, where the salmon have their young, and gorge at leisure.
As a result, those charged with nursing the salmon back to robust health have a new plan to protect them: shoot the birds.
Joyce Casey, chief of the environmental resources branch at the Army Corps of Engineers office in Portland, said that for young salmon headed seaward, the hungry horde of about 30,000 double-crested cormorants on East Sand Island has posed a risk no less serious than that posed by some of the dams her agency built.
Butch Smith, a fisherman, said that killing thousands of the birds “is the one thing out of anything else we can do to recover salmon fastest.”
But Stan Senner of the National Audubon Society argues that to kill off some of the cormorant colony here, which makes up one-quarter of the birds’ western population, “is an extreme measure, totally inappropriate.”
He said it was possible to shoo them away, noting: “They came from somewhere else. They can go back to somewhere else.”
But efforts to encourage the birds to move have been, at best, inconclusive; the cormorants often return to East Sand Island.
This is not the first time the government has decided to kill a predator or a competitor to protect an endangered species.
Last year the Fish and Wildlife Service began to kill up to 3,900 invasive barred owls, which outcompete endangered spotted owls. Since 2008, about 60 salmon-eating sea lions have been killed near the Bonneville Dam in the Columbia River.
In the Great Lakes, the authorities have shot dead thousands of double-crested cormorants over the last several years.
The wisdom of using lethal means to tinker with the new natural order of things created by human activities provokes sharp debate.
This debate is different from ones about killing wolves, coyotes or prairie dogs to protect livestock. Here, both species, the one to be killed and the one to be protected, belong in the wild.
“This is a fascinating issue of how we as a society make choices about how we’re going to use our resources for the benefit of one interest in society to the detriment of another,” Ms. Casey said.
This was true when the Columbia and Snake River dams were built to bring cheap hydropower to the region; it was to the benefit of growing communities, but drastically to the detriment of salmon, whose way to spawning grounds was often impeded by the structures and who were sometimes killed by the dams’ spinning turbines. Thirteen of 19 salmon populations in the Columbia River have been listed either as threatened or endangered.
Read the full story from the New York Times