Parks Canada Is Killing Off Once Vibrant Bird Nesting Colony

by Barry Kent MacKay in Blog, Canada, Coexisting with Wildlife on May 29, 2019

Cormorant density, where any occur at all, is very low. Most of the island is empty of them, and silent. Photo: Born Free USA.

The first time I saw Middle Island, an 18 hectare island and the southernmost land owned by Canada, just a few yards from the American border in the middle of Lake Erie, it was a vibrant, noisy, place filled with nesting birds who habitually share large, mixed colonies. These included double-crested cormorants, herring gulls, great blue herons, black-crowned night-herons, and great egrets, plus families of Canada geese, some mallards, and glittering tree swallows. Ospreys flew over, blackbirds came and went, and I could hear a cardinal singing. For me, a nature-lover with a passion for birds, it was a joyous sight.

But then, the shooting started.

That was quite a few years ago, and I’ll try to briefly explain the reason for the bloodshed in a moment.
The last time I saw Middle Island was early May and I was dismayed that the bird colony is a shell of its former self, with acre after acre depopulated of cormorants and co-nesting species that were once in such exuberant abundance. White pelicans, recognized as a species at risk in Ontario, are being kept from nesting there.
It is as if an invading army had marched most of the length of the island killing with cold efficiency as they progressed, and that is essentially happened – and is again happening this year as I, as I’ve so often done, sat anchored offshore. Apart from being ordered to stay put to avoid stray bullets (or photograph the actual shooting), it is illegal for me to step shore because – and I know this makes no sense – during the nesting season Middle Island is a designated bird sanctuary, and part of Point Pelee National Park, world famous among birders, who are restricted to the mainland, from which distant Middle Island is barely, if at all, visible. The shooters are Parks Canada employees.

Parks Canada employees on Middle Island to kill birds.
Parks Canada staff land on the island to kill the nesting birds, next to a sign that declares it to be a bird sanctuary and closed to the public. Photo: Born Free USA.

Photo of a cormorant in a tree.
There are still cormorants present, but not many. Photo: Born Free USA.
Why are so many thousands of birds shot off their nests each spring? To protect the vegetation. The guano of colonially nesting waterbirds, especially cormorants, can kill plants by adding too much nutriment to the soil and by coating leaves, compromising or ending photosynthesis. Cormorants and herons pull branches loose for nesting material, further harming trees. However, it is also the ground plants whose potential loss concerns Parks Canada. Being so far south, that part of Ontario hosts the northernmost populations of a variety of plant species that are common to the south, in the U.S., but are rare in Canada and thus “protected.” They grow on the mainland, but it is politically difficult to guard habitat there against agriculture and urban sprawl. It is easier to shoot cormorants, chasing herons, night-herons, and egrets. A booming mixed colony of birds is replaced by silent forest to Parks Canada’s apparent preference. I saw even far fewer gulls and geese.

Such threats to some plants, like exotic insect pests, hybridization with non-native related plants, and displacement by non-native weeds such as garlic mustard, have nothing to do with cormorants, and still cormorants are killed and other birds driven away. There’s more going on, as I will explain in my next blog. Stay tuned…

Keep Wildlife in the Wild,
Barry

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Barry Kent MacKay
Director of Canadian and Special Programs