© Lloyd GreenParks Canada plans to keep killing nesting double-crested cormorants on Middle Island (a small, uninhabited island in Lake Erie) and part of Point Pelee National Park. I’ve written about this atrocity before. It is part of an archipelago of islands straddling the imaginary line that forms the U.S. border with Canada.[teaserbreak]
Canada’s rationale was more sophisticated, realizing that science does not support the concerns about fish. Here, the argument was that the island maintains Carolinian zone plants that, being rare in Ontario, need to be protected. Cormorant excrement can kill plants, and the cormorants often exacerbate the “problem” by tearing branches from the trees they nest in, to use in nest-building.
This is natural. The plants are only rare because they’ve been so depleted on the Ontario mainland. In the U.S., most are common. And, if the island was a few meters farther south, they would not be considered rare at all. Management is driven by political, not scientific, principles.
Last year, for the first time on record, white pelicans nested on one of the very small islands (little more than a sandbar, often awash during high water or storms, near Middle Island). They alighted on Middle Island but were prevented from nesting by the shooters.
The pelicans are protected under Ontario’s Endangered Species Act.
The Act protects habitat, stating that:
“habitat” means,
(a) with respect to a species of animal, plant or other organism for which a regulation made under clause 55 (1) (a) is in force, the area prescribed by that regulation as the habitat of the species, or
(b) with respect to any other species of animal, plant or other organism, an area on which the species depends, directly or indirectly, to carry on its life processes, including life processes such as reproduction, rearing, hibernation, migration or feeding
Section 9 of the Act states that:
9. (1) No person shall,
(a) with respect to a species of animal, plant or other organism for which a regulation made under clause 55 (1) (a) is in force, the area prescribed by that regulation as the habitat of the species, or
(b) with respect to any other species of animal, plant or other organism, an area on which the species depends, directly or indirectly, to carry on its life processes, including life processes such as reproduction, rearing, hibernation, migration or feeding
Also, Section 9 of the Act states that:
9. (1) No person shall,
(a) kill, harm, harass, capture or take a living member of a species that is listed on the Species at Risk in Ontario List as an extirpated, endangered or threatened species
The Act was established to protect species like the American white pelican as they recover from having been endangered. Therefore, the killing has to stop.
But, Parks Canada is addicted to killing. It does a lot of it. And, it plans to keep shooting nesting birds, thereby preventing a threatened species from nesting.
Keep wildlife in the wild,
Barry