Taking Up Arms Where Birds Feast on Buffet canada goose of Salmon
ASTORIA, Ore. 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 birds 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 Canada Goose Parka office in Portland, said that for young salmon headed seaward, canada goose black friday sale 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.
Canada Goose online 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 efforts to encourage the birds to move have been, at best, inconclusive; the cormorants often return to East Sand Island.
Canada Goose sale 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.
Canada Goose Jackets The wisdom of using lethal means to tinker with the new natural order of things created by human activities provokes sharp debate.
canada goose black friday sale “This is a fascinating issue of how we as a society make choices about how we’re going to use our resources canada goose store for the benefit of one interest in society to the detriment of another,” Ms. Casey said.
Canada Goose Outlet This was true when the Columbia and Snake River dams were buy canada goose jacket cheap built to bring cheap hydropower to the region; it canada goose coats on sale was to the benefit of growing communities, uk canada goose outlet 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 Canada Goose online dams’ spinning turbines. Thirteen of 19 salmon populations in the Columbia River have been listed either as threatened or endangered.
canada goose clearance Ritchie Graves, a fisheries biologist with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, said that the slow improvement in the abundance of endangered salmon canada goose uk shop on cheap canada goose uk the Columbia River had Canada Goose Online helped create the current predicament.
canada goose store He added that the salmon were uk canada goose responding to the agency’s efforts, and the birds around the region were responding to the improved salmon numbers: “If you’re a predator in California or southern Oregon and you don’t have anything to eat, how many years Canada Goose Coats On Sale before canadian goose jacket you move somewhere else?”
buy canada goose jacket cheap For cormorants around the western United States, “somewhere else” often turned out to be East Sand Island, on the Washington State side of the river and close to the spot where the Columbia River meets the Pacific Ocean.
canada goose clearance sale The cormorants were not the first fish eating birds on East Sand Island to get salmon defenders’ attention. The island, which was significantly reinforced by canada goose uk black friday dredging activity years ago, also houses thousands of Caspian terns.
They canada https://www.cheapcanadagoose.net goose factory sale moved there canada goose 15 years ago prompted by wildlife officials from islands farther up the Columbia River, where salmon were more of their diet.
Biologists then reduced the terns’ prime nesting area by two thirds, to 1.6 acres after federal officials decided that the terns’ potential to eat endangered salmon was still too great. Meanwhile, cormorant numbers go up, even though scientists experimentally reduced the available nesting area they could use to four acres from 16.
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As part of the effort to revise this proposal and ensure it passes judicial muster, scientists have recommended that the corps help the salmon by cutting the cormorant population by nearly two canada goose clearance sale thirds, to a maximum of 5,939 nesting pairs. To do this, the proposed shooting would begin 2015 and end in 2018, leaving 4,000 dead birds a year.
canadian goose jacket Blaine Parker, a fisheries biologist for the Columbia River Intertribal Fish Commission, likes the plan.
canada goose deals “To continue to allow cormorants to grow unchecked is a Canada Goose Jackets serious barrier to salmon recovery,” canada goose clearance he said. The tribes, which have treaty rights to the fish, in 2008 signed 10 year accords with the cheap Canada Goose corps and two other federal agencies to help salmon restoration.
Mr. Parker argues that the government and rate payers who buy hydroelectricity “have spent hundreds of millions annually to make the ecosystem more fish friendly” and do not want to see the fish eaten by birds.
canada goose But Mr. Senner of the National Audubon Society said some of the scientific analysis in the corps’ proposal was insufficient. “We’re not persuaded they have fully explored ways of improving habitats elsewhere or other means of dispersing” the cormorants, he said.
buy canada goose jacket Bob Heess, a retired marine biologist, came late last month to an open house in Astoria during which the corps had conversations with the public and took comments on their plan to shoot birds.
His view: “I’ve canada goose coats seen people try to mess with buy canada goose jacket Mother Nature before, and it never works. It goes toward creating more problems.”
Correction: August 20, 2014
cheap Canada Goose Because of an editing error, an article on Saturday about birds feasting on salmon at the mouth of the Columbia River in Canada Goose Outlet Oregon misstated which of the two flocked to canada goose uk outlet the area to have their young. It was the birds, not Canada Goose sale the salmon.
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