UNITED STATES
We got the big rhubarb here on the West Coast about salmon runs. They say the salmon runs are being depleted because of the dams and on and on and on. Control ’em, as far as I am concerned. The skuzzy birds [cormorants] are eating up all of the salmon. And the tree-huggers want to blame the lack of salmon on everything else, except for things like that. Are you a bird hugger?
VISITOR TO THE TILLAMOOK CHEESE FACTORY,
Oregon, 2002
It is just after 11 p.m. on East Sand Island, Oregon, site of the largest single double-crested cormorant (Phalacrocorax auritus) colony in the United States.1 A light rain has been falling steadily, day and night, for nearly all of March and well into this April. Several cormorants are roosting in what the research team calls the “dissuasion area.” The scientists and managers that run this project want to prevent cormorants from sticking around to nest on this side of a fence, one that they built explicitly this year to delineate a new preferred border to the rookery. They want to see how the cormorants will respond if the ground for the colony is reduced on one side by a fraction, and they want to know where the birds will go once scared away. The researchers want to scare them on this side of the fence before the cormorants get fully settled for the season and start laying eggs.
Since the researchers are already planning to bother the birds on this part of the island, it makes sense to capture several individuals in the process. It is a chance to place identification bands on the cormorants’ legs, as well as to affix to the tail feathers a small radio transmitter that can be used locally to figure out if the birds that are “dissuaded” still find their way back to nesting on East Sand Island—in the approved area on the other side of the fence.
Megan Gensler is a new member of this seasonal research team. She is a little nervous, tired, and the standing around as they prepare is not helping things. An intelligent, poised young woman who is one year out of college, she grew up in the suburbs of Philadelphia. She has some field experience working with pelicans and terns on the coast of North Carolina, but she hasn’t done anything like this before. Megan has handled chicks, but not a full-size adult bird or any animal in a manner anything like what they are about to do. She tells herself they are just birds, but the veterans have told her stories of cormorant bites that cracked one researcher’s wrist, cut the skin of another through a glove, and an event a couple of years ago that sent one woman to the hospital for a puncture wound in her right bicep.
Megan waits within the tent. Their camp consists of two tents, a latrine, and a plywood blind that that looks out onto the main colony over the fence. This blind is covered in gull poop, and during the day it is an oven inside and chock-full of flies. Someone scrawled in Sharpie marker over the top of the entrance: “Outpost of Filth.” The research camp is connected to the fence on the dissuasion side. They call the fence “the Great Wall,” since it goes the width of this narrow section of the island.
Tonight Megan can hear the varied calls of gulls. The cormorants are quiet and are all sleeping. The windows of the tent are zippered closed so that the glow of the hanging propane lantern does not spook any of the birds outside.
Megan is starting to overheat as she waits to begin the cormorant capture. She has already put on all the recommended gear: a headlamp, safety goggles, a bandanna that she’ll pull up to protect herself from the birds’ beaks and the smell of their droppings, as well as knee pads and thick gloves with the fingers cut off so she will have some dexterity. Megan has several layers on to keep her warm but also to protect her arms. She checks to make sure her hair is still secure up in her hat. Megan is one of seven people working tonight. Two others have the specific job title “cormorant capture technician.” She listens as the leader of the group, a postdoc whose specialty is cormorant diet, explains the plan. He tells them to be careful because the birds sometimes go for people’s eyes. Megan feels like she’s in a locker room. She reminds herself: “Keep the goggles on. Don’t get bit. Try to get at least two or three birds.”2
At this moment it is too distant a connection for Megan Gensler to consider that the primary reason she is getting paid to scatter and capture cormorants in the middle of the night, presumably for the long-term good of the bird population, is owing to how this tiny East Sand Island has emerged from the river, then been stabilized, built upon, and managed—which traces back to the planning, interests, approval, and funding of individuals working for more than a dozen local, state, and federal government, tribal, research, and private organizations—who in turn are all institutionally and often personally concerned from one perspective or another about the massive, bewildering, contentious, interlaced near-century-old single question that has dominated the Pacific Northwest: How can we restore the historic runs of salmon?
The Columbia River estuary is a notoriously rainy, blustery part of the world. Despite the best efforts of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, the river mouth just a few miles beyond East Sand Island is something of a nightmare in its force and unpredictability: sands shift, swells and waves come from opposing and senseless directions, and the tidal currents can ramp around at eight knots or more.
When Robert Gray first found for the Americans the rumored entrance to the Columbia in 1792, East Sand Island did not exist as it does today.3 Sand Island seems to have been an underwater shoal that over the decades was washed around and then emerged and shifted after various storm events. It was not until the 1850s that Sand Island began to appear on charts, although in a different location.4 Over the decades a thin hand formed from the elbow and began to separate, which in the early twentieth century started to be identified as East Sand Island.5
Cormorants as well as gulls, terns, murres, pelicans, and a variety of shorebirds, sea ducks, eagles, and falcons have surely been fishing these waters and nesting on islands, on cliffs, on beaches, and among the trees and shorelines along the Columbia River for millennia.6 It was not until 1836, however, that John K. Townsend gave the first description of the region by a trained naturalist who focused on birds. Townsend, in his early twenties, had traveled overland to the area from Philadelphia—the same part of the country coincidentally that Megan Gensler is from.
Townsend wrote: “The [double-crested cormorant] is common on the river, & there are at least three more species of the same genus not yet indicated, which reside near the Cape [Disappointment] & probably nest upon the surf washed sides. They never ascend the rivers & are in consequence very difficult to be procured.”7
Today there are indeed four species of cormorants flapping around the Pacific Coast–Alaska region—although only three of those live in the Columbia River estuary: double-crested, Brandt’s cormorants (P. penicillatus), and pelagic cormorants (P. pelagicus). Townsend sent skins of two species of cormorant that he shot at Cape Disappointment to John James Audubon, who returned the favor by calling one of them a “Townsend’s Cormorant.” But this name for the Brandt’s did not stick, even though Audubon wrote of Townsend as “that zealous student of nature.”8 The fourth cormorant species of the Pacific Coast–Alaska region is the red-faced cormorant (P. urile). It is possible that Townsend saw one of these near the Columbia, but according to current records they rarely make it south of Alaska.9 From afar all four of these species of cormorant look fairly similar, but with a little patience it’s not impossible to identify each, because of the slightly different coloration, size, and the posture while flying. Though their nesting and foraging often overlap, their ecological niches are different.10 Three or more species of cormorants overlap throughout most of the Pacific Coast and up along Alaska and out to the Aleutians. (See map on page 26.)
The double-crested cormorant on East Sand Island belongs to the subspecies P. a. albociliatus and prefers calmer waters. As Townsend observed, it is the only cormorant of the Pacific Coast–Alaska region that lives inland from the coast. (Taxonomists recognize a second West Coast double-crested cormorant subspecies, P. a. cincinatus, which lives only in Alaska; there seems to be little overlap in their range. Federal managers clump the two together and call it the Pacific Coast–Alaska population.11) Double-crested cormorants P. a. albociliatus nest along the coast from Baja to Vancouver and beside freshwater lakes or rivers, including beside the farthest reaches of the Columbia River watershed. There are little gangs of double-crested cormorants nesting and diving right now in lakes and rivers in the middle of British Columbia and colonies in Idaho, Montana, Nevada, Utah, Colorado, and Arizona.12 The cormorants nesting at Yellowstone Lake in Wyoming live at over 7,700 feet (2,245 m) above sea level.13
Double-crested cormorants nesting away from the ocean within the western states is nothing new. In 1808 explorer and naturalist David Thompson observed cormorants beside Kootenay Lake in British Columbia, near the source of the Columbia River north of Idaho. Thompson wrote: “There are many Cormorants, we killed one, they are very fishy tast[ing] and their eggs almost as bad as those of a Loon; [its] eyes a fine bright green ... the head and neck of a glossy black, with a bunch of feathers on each side of the back of the head.”14
Western double-crested cormorants when in breeding plumage have crests that grow to a variety of sizes, shapes, and shades: huge white crests that stick straight out, black crests that curl, or even sometimes a salt-and-pepper mix. It seems most double-crested cormorants west of the Continental Divide stay fairly close to their rookeries all year, although those of East Sand Island generally disperse in the winter.15
Double-crested cormorants, although they get in the most trouble with people, are actually the least populous cormorants along the extensive Pacific Coast–Alaska region. Red-faced cormorants are probably the most numerous cormorants in the West, with something like one hundred thousand breeding pairs. There are roughly sixty-five thousand pairs of pelagic cormorants in a similar range but extending farther south.16 Some seventy-five thousand Brandt’s cormorant pairs range from British Columbia to Mexico. And lastly there are about 35,000 double-crested pairs in this Pacific Coast–Alaska population (32,000 P. a. albociliatus; 3,000 P. a. cincinatus), including those on the coast and breeding inland.17
To further put the Pacific Coast–Alaska double-crested cormorant population in perspective, in 1913 a biologist surveying San Martín Island, off Baja, California, estimated a single colony of double-crested cormorants at almost 350,000 breeding pairs. This was likely overestimated, but even so it remains by far the largest single double-crested colony ever recorded.18 By the end of the century there were but six hundred pairs of cormorants living on San Martín.19
So East Sand Island today, with fewer than 15,000 pairs, is the largest double-crested cormorant colony on the West Coast, and one of the two largest in all North America.20 My point is that it is safe to conclude that cormorants were once far more common on the West Coast than they are in the twenty-first century.21
Around the Columbia River estuary, the Brandt’s and pelagic cormorants are not appreciably on the public radar, partly because their numbers are much smaller and because they tend to fish more along the ocean coast. There are about 1,500 pairs of Brandt’s that breed within the double-crested colony on East Sand Island. Dozens of pelagics nest on the cliffs outside the river and underneath the bridge to Astoria.22 All the cormorants probably eat a salmon smolt or a dozen when available, but owing to habitat and local population size it is the double-crested cormorant that is known these days as the “salmon killer.”23 Megan Gensler says that once when she was in line at the marine supply store in Astoria, a local guy told her: “They should burn that East Sand Island with all the birds on it.”24
The American poet Robinson Jeffers wrote regularly about the wildlife of the Pacific. His poem “Birds and Fishes” was published posthumously in 1963. The setting is in Monterey Bay, California:
BIRDS AND FISHES
Every October millions of little fish come along the shore,
Coasting this granite edge of the continent
On their lawful occasions: but what a festival for the sea-fowl.
What a witches’ sabbath of wings
Hides the dark water. The heavy pelicans shout “Haw!” like Job’s
warhorse
And dive from the high air, the cormorants
Slip their long black bodies under the water and hunt like wolves
Through the green half-light. Screaming the gulls watch,
Wild with envy and malice, cursing and snatching. What hysterical
greed!
What a filling of pouches! the mob—
Hysteria is nearly human—these decent birds!—as if they were
finding
Gold in the street. It is better than gold,
It can be eaten: and which one in all this fury of wildfowl pities
the fish?
No one certainly. Justice and mercy
Are human dreams, they do not concern the birds nor the fish nor
eternal God.
However—look again before you go.
The wings and the wild hungers, the wave-worn skerries, the bright
quick minnows
Living in terror to die in torment—
Man’s fate and theirs—and the island rocks and immense ocean
beyond, and Lobos
Darkening above the bay: they are beautiful?
That is their quality: not mercy, not mind, not goodness, but the
beauty of God.25
The capture method that Megan and her colleagues are about to employ in running into the dissuasion area is rarely done on East Sand Island because it is so disruptive, though it has been carefully reviewed by the Institutional Animal Care and Use Committee at Oregon State University. At the start of her job Megan and the other new researchers were required to pass a course to be certified to handle animals.
Later in the summer Megan might get a chance to capture within the main colony, instead of in this dissuasion area at the far edge. To catch the birds within, the researchers use an entirely different method. After the cormorants have begun nesting, they do not want to disturb birds in the way that they are going to do tonight in the dissuasion area.
Over the course of previous winters, the research team on East Sand Island has erected and expanded stretches of aboveground tunnels constructed out of wood and black tarp. From these tunnels the researchers facilitate cormorant capture without widespread disturbance, they observe birds closely, and they get access to an observation tower in the heart of the colony into which two or three people might squeeze and spend long hours and even overnights.
The triangular tunnels enter the colony from the beach, then snake into the middle of the nesting area. I can tell you from experience that they are just large enough for a small man to maneuver on his hands and knees over the sand, feathers, guano splatters, bones, and other detritus. The guano smell is aggressive. Before we went in, we each pulled on a construction face mask with an air filter. Inside the tunnels we were inches away from the birds without the animals seeming to take much notice. We were so close that I could hear a bird nibbling at its feathers. At one point when I was by myself and crawling in one of the branches of the tunnels, I had to sneeze. I couldn’t help it. I tried desperately to hold it in, and then I buried it in my elbow. A cormorant pecked in at me through the construction cloth.
As with the cormorant capture in the dissuasion area, the method from the tunnels within the colony is done at night. To allow this to happen, early in the season the researchers place rubber tires alongside the tunnels just outside openings in the tunnel walls. Double-crested cormorants like to nest in these tires, so the parents unsuspectingly lay their eggs within an arm’s length of a trapdoor.
The cormorant capture within the colony usually involves two researchers crawling in the tunnels out to a row of tire nests. They do not risk using a headlamp, as the light might wake the birds, even through the cloth. It can be so dark in the tunnels that the researchers determine where they are by counting the wood frames by feel. Once at their spot, one person gently pulls back the fabric. He or she finds the shape of a sleeping cormorant in a tire nest. After a couple of deep breaths and a nod, the person reaches out and grabs the base of the bird’s head, just underneath the beak. Sometimes the bird does not even wake up until it is in the tunnel and its mate has stepped into the nest to cover the eggs, as if he or she were in on the plan. Ideally the person grabbing the cormorant keeps the beak away while his or her partner gets the wings under control. If the project requires the banding of chicks, they do this immediately inside the tunnel, in the dark. If it is an adult cormorant that is to get a band or tracking device, they put the bird in a canvas bag and scramble with the animal to a little windowless outpost off one of the tunnels where they can use a light and have slightly more room to do the job. Before they built that outpost, there used to be a “surgery hut” back outside the colony and practically half the island away. The older researchers tell Megan tales of when veterinary surgeons came on the island to insert satellite tags. The researchers had to slog in the middle of the night through the water, sloshing up to their waists in the bay while carrying terrified cormorants in bags over their heads to the surgery hut.
Tonight, however, in the dissuasion area—on the edge of the main colony and far from the tunnels and several weeks before any nesting has begun—the team that Megan is working with for her first cormorant capture will employ a sort of bum rush method, sprinting in among the sleeping cormorants with handheld spotlights. Megan has been given a huge dip net. Other researchers will grab the birds by hand.
Despite the Columbia River’s dangerous entrance—which in large part kept Astoria from becoming a Seattle or a San Francisco—the river has remained a crucial artery for commerce. In order for the large ships to move up and down the river to Portland and beyond with any degree of safety and predictability, the channel needs to be dredged. The ships steam close to East Sand Island on their way in from the bar. Megan can look off the porch of the research team’s rental house in the hills of Astoria down onto the Columbia River. Nearly every morning she sees at least one or two massive ships from countries such as China and Korea—empty of ballast and standing by to make the trip upriver.
The Army Corps of Engineers has had several major pushes over the decades to maintain the navigability of the Columbia to accommodate bigger ships. In the 1950s and ’60s, the Army Corps was digging the channel and needed a place to dump the dredge spoils. So they used these materials to stabilize and extend East Sand Island.26 About fifteen miles farther upriver, the Corps also created a brand-new island out of dredge deposits. They named this Rice Island.
Stick with me here because, as digressive as this all sounds, it is a compelling example of how convoluted wildlife management problems can get, giving even Russ McCullough’s “nothing natural” Lake Ontario a run for its complexity. And I promise it spirals back to the cormorants and salmon and Megan Gensler getting paid to stand there in the middle of the night with her safety glasses on and a bandanna over her face while she is holding a net wider than a bicycle tire and hoping not to get a beak puncture in her bicep. It also helps illuminate why a man from Portland at a cheese factory in Tillamook, Oregon, would like the government to thoroughly eliminate all these “skuzzy birds.”
Hydroelectric power from the hundreds of dams along the Columbia and its tributaries supplies a significant portion of the electricity for the homes in the Pacific Northwest. The dam system also pumps irrigation for millions of acres of farmland, provides the security of flood control to properties, and allows the safe navigation of commerce all the way into Idaho. I don’t need to tell you, though, that dams significantly alter a river’s ecosystem, especially to anadromous fish such as salmon. For the First Peoples of the region, salmon held the central role—culturally, ecologically, and economically. Scholars believe that when Lewis and Clark arrived, salmon had already provided physical and spiritual sustenance to native peoples for some nine thousand years.27 The early fur traders and settlers soon moved into the business of salmon when they recognized the enormity of the resource and had a method to preserve and ship it. Astoria supported at its peak in the 1880s as many as forty salmon canneries supplied by over a thousand commercial boats, using a variety of methods to fish on the Columbia. In 1883 Astoria packed over thirty million pounds of salmon into cans.28 By then men had constructed almost fifty fish traps, fish wheels, and canneries just within and around Sand Island and the surrounding Baker’s Bay.29
By the 1920s the runs were already declining precipitously because of continued fishing pressure, logging practices that destroyed riverside habitat, and industrial pollution. The early network of dams had also already cut off, by one estimate, fully half of the entire watershed to salmon migration.30 This was even before the construction of the New Deal hydro-power behemoths.
Today salmon are still significant to the Columbia River region in many ways, but represent only a medium-size recreational fishing interest and a small commercial fishery.31 The salmon you buy in a restaurant outside of the immediate area rarely comes from the Columbia region.32
Yet salmon still represent a deep cultural connection, both as a symbol for First Peoples and a reminder of “the good old days” for current residents of the Columbia. This is similar on a much larger scale to the way some Gifucians feel about their anadromous ayu and ukai, or how residents of Henderson Harbor feel about smallmouth bass. Salmon makes the Pacific Northwest different from other parts of the world. Salmon has become the iconic animal and the indicator species for environmental health in an area that prides itself on conservation and green living.33
Salmon—and I’m talking salmonids here, which include sockeye salmon, chinook salmon, chum salmon, steelhead trout, and other closely related species—travel upriver to spawn. Fertilized eggs grow through a variety of stages into smolts, which are large enough at a few inches to make the trip downriver and eventually out into salt water. Columbia River salmon runs have a wide variety of migrations, some voyaging out for several years into the North Pacific, ranging as far north as the Bering Sea. Regardless, they then return to the river of their birth, swimming up to the place of their hatching to continue their species. This upriver run of the adults, many of which die after spawning, not only once provided for a new generation of salmon but also once helped fertilize and feed a diverse web of plants and animals upriver.
Spurred by the mandates of the Mitchell Act in 1938, hydropower companies showed some effort to help maintain salmon runs by installing fish ladders at the dams and funding salmon hatcheries. But none of these strategies were all that effective in overcoming the extent of the disruption. In the 1970s, along with other major environmental awakenings around the country, resurged a public recognition of the significant role and vast diminishment of the salmon populations. Meanwhile federal courts affirmed the nineteenth-century treaties that protected the salmon rights and allocation of the caught fish to First Peoples. Then in the 1990s a few distinct populations (“evolutionary significant units”) of Columbia River salmon were placed on the endangered species list. Others were federally designated as threatened.34
In response to all this, dams were required to install still more fish ladder systems. Fish hatcheries were more carefully managed. Scientists delved more thoroughly into the effects of hatchery fish on wild populations. Today some 70 percent of all salmon caught commercially in the Columbia basin originated in a hatchery of some sort.35 The Army Corps of Engineers and the Bonneville Power Administration fund each year the barging of millions of salmon smolts to get them safely through the dams when heading downstream. They also run a program that pipes the young salmon into trucks to deliver them downriver by highway, thus skipping the dams. The Corps has constructed guidance screens to keep the smolts from being sucked into the turbine blades on the way downstream. These screens funnel the salmon into a bypass channel from which they can continue downriver. At certain high migration times of the year, hydropower plants such as Bonneville Dam, the one closest to the mouth of the Columbia, stop some of their turbines completely to give fish an easier time of getting through.
I’ve watched cormorants and osprey hang out beside the bypass channel release point at Bonneville Dam. They wait to catch fish. Also waiting for salmon smolts are northern pikeminnows, a native fish that has prospered thanks to the placement of dams, because pikeminnows thrive in still water. Trying to protect the salmon, the Army Corps offers a $4 to $8 bounty for each pikeminnow caught that is longer than nine inches (23 cm). You’ll earn $500 if you hook one that has been tagged by the Bonneville Power Administration and the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife.36 (Yes, cormorants eat pikeminnows.) To further protect migrating salmon smolts, workers for Bonneville Dam occasionally use water jets aimed at the hungry birds and the sea lions that swim all the way upriver to enjoy the easy, concentrated food supply.
Now here is where it really returns to the seabirds. When explaining the threats to the salmon in the Pacific Northwest, wildlife managers typically use the mnemonic of the “four H’s”: habitat, hatcheries, harvest, and hydropower. Yet in the late 1990s they needed to add another “H”—for Hydroprogne, the genus name for the Caspian tern (Hydroprogne caspia). After the endangered species listing of the salmon, managers began to examine what portion of the smolts that made it through and beyond the dams—by their own means or by barge or truck—were not making it all the way to the Pacific. Early studies suggested that birds, mostly terns, were eating a surprisingly large percentage of smolts before the young salmon swam their last miles of the Columbia toward the Pacific. Soon the dams, the federal government, the tribes, the water companies, the agricultural interests, and the environmental groups all began to be invested, figuratively and literally, in understanding what impact the birds were having.
The research project on East Sand Island in which Megan Gensler is involved is run by a collaborative organization called Bird Research Northwest.37 Cormorant dissuasion is a small part of their expansive study of the entire region, examining over a dozen seabird colonies in the three contiguous Pacific states. It is funded with the primary mission of getting at this question of bird predation on salmon and learning ways to resolve the problem.
The entire project has grown to become one of the best-funded longterm bird studies in the world, certainly of those that involve cormorants. It is not at the level of funding that goes toward studying Antarctic penguins or building blinds in the canopy of the rain forest, but where else on earth do cormorant researchers have two elevated observation structures to observe these birds, accessed by a network of tunnels so as not to disturb the colony? Megan Gensler is not out eating Dungeness crab every night or buying a new hybrid hatchback, but during her first summer, Bird Research Northwest paid for her to go on aerial surveys and funded her travel to observe colonies as distant as Puget Sound and the Salton Sea. Bird Research Northwest runs a detailed and accessible website, has funded and supported almost a dozen PhD and master’s projects, and has produced scores of scientific papers and government reports. Over the last two decades Bird Research Northwest has compiled an exceptionally impressive and useful pot of biological knowledge about coastal seabirds, as well as advancing our understanding of which management actions and tools regarding these animals “work”—and which do not.
The initial bird “problem,” the previous “salmon killer” before the cormorants took over this title, was this Caspian tern, a white bird with a black shock of head feathers and a scarlet dagger-shaped bill. This is the largest of the terns. Terns don’t dive underwater appreciably, but instead plummet from the air, like gannets or pelicans, and nab fish from just under the surface.38 While attracting mates and raising chicks, terns fly conspicuously with a fish in their beaks. Flapping around with waggling salmon smolts didn’t help their public image.
The first records of Caspian terns nesting in the Columbia River estuary was in 1984 on East Sand Island, immediately after some dredge materials were deposited.39 After a couple of years the nesting habitat was apparently better upriver at newly formed Rice Island. Here the tern colony really took off, growing into the largest Caspian tern colony in the world at over 8,700 breeding pairs.40 Between 1997 and 1998 Bird Research Northwest found that salmon made up almost three-quarters of the diet of the tern colony on Rice Island. The terns ate almost 13 percent of all outbound smolts, which totaled an estimated 12.4 million juvenile salmonids.41
After a few years of study and public hearings, as well as navigating suits from several environmental groups including the National Audubon Society and Defenders of Wildlife, the Corps contracted Bird Research Northwest to encourage the tern colony to move back to East Sand Island.42 The thinking was that East Sand was still a safe, mammal-free island but closer to the ocean: the terns would diversify their diet. On East Sand Island the managers cleared vegetation so it looked as it did after the deposition of dredge spoils, thus making an appealing sandy nesting area. Terns are pickier about their bedding than cormorants. The researchers placed tern-shaped plastic decoys in the sand. They blared a recording of tern colony sounds. On Rice Island, they dissuaded.
The project worked. Within three years, the entire tern colony moved back downriver to East Sand Island, and the result was a substantially reduced percentage of the tern diet composed of salmon.
Over the years, however, as the tern colony thrived on one end of East Sand Island, so did the cormorants at the other end. From one perspective, the cormorants gummed up a perfectly good plan that seemed to be moving along nicely to help the salmon, the terns, and most of the humans along the Columbia coexist.43
Double-crested cormorants first started nesting on East Sand Island in the late 1980s.44 Both cormorants and terns eat a wide variety of fish from the river, including anchovies, surfperch, sardines, herring, sculpin, and flounder.45
The double-crested cormorants of the Columbia River basin forage for a large variety of fish in a range of salinities, from ocean salt water to river fresh water. Within a range of less than ten miles (16 km), the East Sand Island cormorants dive around the stone jetties leading to the ocean, across the tidal flats of sand and mud in the river, in the waters of marshes, in the local creeks and tributaries that feed into the Columbia mouth, and even right in the middle of the shipping channel.46 The cormorants seem to especially like to forage around pilings and sometimes collect downstream of a line of these dock structures, perhaps taking advantage of fish that are either a bit disoriented by the pilings or are more relaxed due to the lessened current.47
I posed the question of whether cormorants have a bigger appetite than other seabirds to Daniel Roby, professor at Oregon State University and one of the lead investigators at Bird Research Northwest. He explained to me that one cormorant needs on average three to four times more small fish each day than that required by one tern. “Though this amount of fish as a proportion of a cormorant’s body weight is not larger when compared to tern food requirements,” Roby says, “cormorants do need considerably more food than other seabirds their same size.” The larger a bird gets, the less food it needs in relation to its mass, but cormorants have a high metabolic rate, likely in part because it takes a lot of energy to dive underneath the water to hunt and to stay warm. Cormorants also raise more chicks than most other birds their size, which also requires a lot of energy and food.48
Certainly cormorant and tern diet varies within the year based on the birds’ energetic needs and the larger movements of fish. The birds’ choice of prey varies from year to year, too, notably in the coastal Pacific in response to short- and long-term climatic changes, such as during El Niño years.
Bird Research Northwest continued its studies. To further reduce salmon depredation, the organization was contracted to help relocate the terns to still other places outside the Columbia. Meanwhile, the cormorants overtook the terns in numbers on East Sand Island. Soon cormorants were eating more than the terns in total numbers of smolts. In 2011 the double-crested cormorant colony of about 13,000 breeding pairs ate an estimated 20.5 million salmon smolts. This was roughly one in every seven smolts that had survived to swim outbound to sea. Salmon made up almost 20 percent of the cormorants’ diet.49 The cormorants ate samples from endangered and threatened wild runs, but a majority of the salmon gobbled up were hatchery-raised fish.50
From the perspective of a wildlife manager looking to “restore” the historic fish populations, every single one of these outbound smolts represents a tiny silvery piece of the regional cultural identity: each young salmon has been raised with an immense investment of emotion, money, time, and labor—not to be stolen by the cormorants.51
Just south of the Columbia River region, various other Oregon groups have been angry about cormorants eating salmon. Studying this phenomenon has been an ornithologist named Range Bayer. One morning he kindly took me on a birding trip around Yaquina Bay, during which he told me how he once had a job for several years at a private fish farm. At one point the boss had him driving a truck around to scare cormorants off a fish pond.
“An impossible job,” Bayer said. “There was just no way.”52
In 2000 Bayer put together an impressive forty-page report titled “Cormorant Harassment to Protect Juvenile Salmonids in Tillamook County, Oregon.” In order to protect salmon smolts released from hatcheries in three estuaries, the federal government along with the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife gave license to private individuals to harass cormorants—a more intense form of dissuasion. The men used speedboats. When it was too shallow for boats, they used hovercraft. They fired at the cormorants with cracker and screamer shells. They played cormorant distress calls over loudspeakers. They installed human-like dummies, which you could call “scare-cormorants.” Bayer found that over a decade none of this had any positive or negative correlative effect on the survival of smolts.53 He said the program was largely driven in the first place by the interests of a few recreational fishermen.
For my humble part I conducted an informal and unscientific survey of twenty-five workers and visitors at the Tillamook Cheese Factory, Tillamook, Oregon, soon after Bayer’s study came out. I wanted to find out if anybody had heard of the controversy of cormorants eating salmon along their coast or even up in the Columbia. To be honest, almost everyone with whom I spoke, both locals and tourists, did not even know what a cormorant is. All were familiar with salmon issues. Several people identified the federally protected sea lions as the major threat. Yet one man spoke to me about an island off Portland that he understood contained “millions” of cormorants, which he called “skuzzy birds.” He saw the cormorants as the primary cause of salmon mortality on the river, more so even than the dams. He would not give his name.
He asked me: “Are you a bird hugger?”54
Another attempt to restore salmon populations and human jobs on the Columbia River, instituted in the 1970s, was the installation of net pen facilities below the dams, near the Columbia’s mouth. Workers at the net pens get a load of small fish brought down in trucks from upriver hatcheries, and then raise them to smolts. After several months in the water of the estuary, the juvenile salmon are released. If all goes well, a couple of years later the fish return to the mouth of the Columbia and the net pens area, instead of trying to travel all the way upriver to spawn above the dams. Here at the mouth by Astoria the recreational and commercial fishing fleet wait with gill nets and fishing rods.
The net pens themselves are a series of floating frames with netting below and above to contain the little salmon and to prevent the birds and larger fish from eating them. When the net pen fish are released, the facilities managers have developed methods to avoid having them all being chomped immediately by the birds. They have learned to release the smolts at night and on an ebb tide.55
The Youngs Bay net pen facility, for example, releases millions of smolts each year. Occasionally a sea lion or river otter tears into their pens. The workers there told me a story of when a guy forgot to replace the top netting one morning, and five cormorants got into the pen and ate so many salmon the birds could not fly away. East Sand Island is about the same distance to the rearing pens as is Rice Island, so the moving of the terns did not make much difference for their interests.
I asked the men at Youngs Bay if they or the locals viewed the terns and the cormorants any differently. Keep Jeffers’s poem “Birds and Fishes” in your mind, because one worker explained to me: “The terns have a certain notoriety to them. They are one of the farthest migrating birds in the world, they are a pretty bird. But they sure sound obnoxious. Boy, they just ‘Blaah!’” He pointed out into the bay and gestured with one arm:
They just fly over and they just dive, just bam, just one after the other. The cormorants, when they are coming in, it’s amazing. You can see these big lines of birds, a black mass, in the Bay. They’ll come down and see a group of fish, and they’ll all land and they’ll all dive together and come up with fish in their mouth. The cormorants will line up. On the mudflats up here they’ll dive down to get ’em, they will come up, they will crowd the fish, or they scare the fish right up onto the beach, and the fish are flopping around on the beach, and you’ll see silver masses of our salmon. And the cormorants get up there and they are just wolfing them down. It’s horrible.56
Like so many other interests in the area, the workers at the Youngs Bay net pens monitor closely the numbers published each year as to the percentage and volume of salmon that the cormorants and terns eat. These figures are mostly determined by biologists at Bird Research Northwest. For both terns and cormorants on East Sand Island, biologists collect at the end of the nesting season all of the tens of thousands of passive integrated transponders (PIT tags) that are left on the ground in a given area. These tags are tiny cylinders placed in a sample of hatchery and wild fish, identifying exactly which hatchery or net pen or river the fish came from and when. The birds poop or spit these tags out with other materials they naturally purge. In addition, for terns, Megan and her colleagues on East Sand sit in a blind, in shifts, and observe and record the fish species that the terns feed their young. The researchers also occasionally shoot screamer shells to get the adult terns to drop the fish they are carrying back in their beaks. The screamer gun doesn’t really work to get cormorants to barf up their fish, so to determine cormorant diet, in addition to the PIT tags, the researchers hire a few professionals to help them shoot about 140 cormorants a year in order to provide stomach samples. They pick the birds off with shotguns from a boat as the birds are returning to the colony. (Cormorants float, so the marksmen scoop up the dead birds with a dip net.)57 Combining all these methods, the Bird Research Northwest biologists estimate predation on salmon and other fish species for the breeding season, using population and consumption models derived in part by Don Lyons, the same biologist who is leading Megan’s first cormorant capture. The predation estimates can never be foolproof or 100 percent accurate, but trying to get these numbers correct is a full-time job for several people, working upon decades of trial and error.
Now the net pen guys watch these numbers each year to see how many of their salmon are ending up on East Sand Island. And they see with their own eyes the cormorants eating the salmon. These men are not unreasonable as to birds. They recognize that this problem is largely man-made. But when asked if he had an answer, one worker told me: “I have a radical theory. It involves napalm.”58 He was kidding—mostly.
As with the situation on Ron Ditch’s Little Galloo Island, the solution is unlikely to be as simple as moving or culling the cormorant colony. One local newspaper editorial proposed sneaking onto East Sand Island and introducing a couple of pigs—as vigilantes did on an island with an unwanted cormorant colony in Lake Michigan.59 The Pacific Coast–Alaska cormorant population on the whole has been increasing over the last couple of decades by about 3 percent per year—which is substantial when you think about it.60 The double-crested colony on East Sand Island currently represents almost 40 percent of an entire subspecies.61 The growth of the cormorant population on East Sand did not just begin with their reproducing like mad. It expanded too fast at first for that alone. This colony is composed of a large portion of birds that emigrated years ago, presumably for the food, from other parts of the coast and from inland, from perhaps as far away as British Columbia.62
Like the double-crested cormorants on the other side of the Continental Divide, the Pacific Coast–Alaska population of double-cresteds seems to have been on a roller coaster since European contact. They rebounded during the latter third of the twentieth century for reasons similar to those of the other cormorant populations in North America: environmentally friendly legislation, banning of chemicals such as DDT, improved health of water qualities and fish stocks, increased open air aquaculture, and man-made reservoirs and protected islands.63 Wiping out the colony on East Sand Island would do serious damage to double-crested cormorants in this part of the world. It is worth noting that in the current federal cormorant management plan (2003/2008), none of the twenty-four states that are now allowed to issue permits to kill cormorants or oil eggs is to the west of the Rockies.
Bird Research Northwest has been working on nonlethal solutions for East Sand Island. The researchers have been experimenting with moving cormorants to man-made islands in other less salmon-centric locations outside the Columbia River. They are trying the same methods they deployed with terns, including playing cormorant sounds from speakers and placing plastic cormorant-shaped decoys at the new sites.
East Sand Island is owned and managed officially by the Army Corps of Engineers. Local fishermen tell stories of camping out there as children, but now if they land there unescorted they would break several laws and regulations. Amid the Bird Research Northwest tunnels, towers, temporary walls, and campgrounds is a curious mix of human artifacts, including half-sunk railway track leading into the water and wood pilings in various states of barnacled, worm-eaten decomposition. With the land artificially stabilized, the terns introduced through decoys and recorded calls, and the cormorant population rising and nesting opportunistically for a variety of anthropogenic reasons, East Sand Island is a peculiar place.
And it gets still more complicated.
When Megan Gensler was on the island, over 14,000 brown pelicans roosted on East Sand, arriving after they had finished nesting as far south as Mexico. East Sand Island is now the largest non-nesting roost of brown pelicans on the West Coast.64 So far it seems the pelicans are not yet appreciably eating a lot of salmon, but this bird has only just recently been lifted off the endangered species list—which means the managers conducting their cormorant and tern activities must be careful not to bother the pelicans. Not coincidentally, the American Bird Conservancy and the Audubon Society have recognized East Sand Island as regionally and internationally important.65
Megan also witnessed an unprecedented amount of predation on the rookeries. It is common for a few terns to be taken by owls and falcons and perhaps even a river otter. Resident gulls often opportunistically eat the eggs and chicks of cormorants and terns. But this season, bald eagles started preying on East Sand Island birds in a way not seen in recent memory. One or two eagles flew in at dusk or after dark to take adult terns. This so freaked out the tern colony that not a single chick successfully fledged over the summer. Megan and a stunned research staff watched a complete failure of this tern colony. Every time an eagle swooped in after sunset, the entire flock of terns took flight and did not return for hours or even until the next day. This allowed the gulls to hop in and eat up all the eggs and chicks.
The eagles also went into the cormorant colony at the other end of East Sand Island. Juvenile eagles alighted smack in the middle of the cormorant rookery, sending off those that could fly. The eagles then marched along and ate cormorant chicks and eggs, something that even the veteran researchers had never witnessed or heard about. Neither the double-crested cormorants nor the Brandt’s cormorants on East Sand saw any sort of collapse at the level of the terns. Cormorants returned to their nests as soon as the eagles left. But it certainly wasn’t a banner reproductive year. One theory is that there was not enough fish for the eagles, so they were turning to other prey sources. Then again, as eagle populations recover across North America, their attacks on seabird colonies, including on cormorants, have been recorded elsewhere on the Oregon coast, beside the waters of Victoria, British Columbia, in the Gulf of Maine, and on Lake Champlain.66
During Megan Gensler’s season on East Sand Island the cormorant colony also got hit with Newcastle disease, a virus better known to infect poultry. Newcastle disease seems to afflict a percentage of the chicks or juvenile cormorants every couple of years on the island.67 It has been recorded in double-crested cormorants in various other parts of North America since the 1970s.68 Cormorants with Newcastle suffer a sort of palsy. They cannot lift a wing. They walk at an angle. They hold their neck crookedly. Though the disease is not the same strain that can tear through farm poultry—the East Sand researchers confirm this each time—the island foreman still gets panicked calls from a variety of state and federal disease control officials to make sure certain steps are taken. This was one of the reasons we wore masks when crawling in the cormorant tunnels. During Megan’s summer, dozens of birds were stricken with Newcastle. She found it difficult to just watch them die.
From inside the blind, aka “The Outpost of Filth,” built to look over the dissuasion fence, I watched one of the cormorants with Newcastle dying. Along a line of rocks, it was lying on its back beside another that had died earlier, one that was now gray and splattered with droppings from the other birds. The fading cormorant could only stroke its right foot, as if paddling. It did this constantly, with the one foot paddling over and over for several hours. The animal grew more gray and white-splattered as the birds around it went about their business. Yet it kept paddling with the one foot, usually at the same rate. The dying cormorant occasionally tried to lift its head. It did this for so long that I had to leave, to go to bed, and even when I climbed up to check on it the next morning at first light, the bird was still paddling, but slower.
The cormorant capture team creeps out of the tent, past the dissuasion fence, and around by the latrine. The leader turns on the spotlight. He gives a shout. The people run out at different angles. Hundreds of gulls riot. Megan Gensler forgets to turn on her headlamp. She trips over a log. Most of the cormorants flap, croak, fly off. Megan recovers herself, turns on her headlamp, and picks her net back up. She is surprised to see how passive and frozen several other cormorants still are. The soft ground is uneven. She hurries forward, climbing over another log. She spots a cormorant sitting there staring into her light with one eye. She slips the net over the top of the bird. She pulls out one of the cotton bags from her belt, reaches inside the net, and clasps the cormorant around its neck just under the beak. She places the struggling bird in the bag. Ties it up. The cormorant gives a sort of honk, tries to walk but falls down, and then lies motionless and quiet.
Within two minutes from their turn around the outhouse, Megan suddenly realizes everything is done. The gulls are still raucously flying overhead. She looks back and sees several other gulls standing on top of the tents, cawing urgently.
The researchers shout to each other. “Anyone free? Give me a hand here!”
The spotlights are switched off. Megan leaves her bagged cormorant as her eyes begin to adjust. She pulls down her bandanna and rushes over to help, crouching low. A few cormorants croak. The sound of rustling: feathers against cotton.
Someone laughs and says: “Hey, stop that!”
“I’m free, who needs help?” another shouts.
“Need another bag over here!”
The lead technician had got his net around three cormorants at the same time. He is now lying there, also holding two more cormorants that he had somehow reached over and grabbed with his free hand. In all, they have fifteen birds.
Back inside the tent, Megan and the others carefully lift the cormorants out of the bags to place them into ventilated cardboard pet boxes. They turn off the propane heaters inside the tent. The leader directs two birds to be released because their tail feathers are not in good enough shape to take a radio tag. They release another bird that is too young to breed. Megan hears one cormorant regurgitate some fish into its box.
Now the researchers go to work in the way that you do in the middle of the night: slightly loopy because you’re tired, but also diligent because everything feels more intense when it is dark out and you want to finish the job and get back to bed. Megan and the two other new people are charged with holding the birds while the more experienced researchers place bands on the ankles and affix the radio tags. This involves a drop or two of Super Glue and a few small zip ties around the base of two tail feathers. (The tags will fall off with the first molt of these feathers.) After each cormorant is banded and tagged, Megan walks the bird out of the tunnel and onto the beach. She releases it. She waits a few minutes to make sure that it flies away safely. After a pause, a dazed stumble, each of the tagged cormorants that night does indeed fly off.
By about 1 a.m. the capture team is cleaning up. Everyone has bird droppings on their clothes. Splatters are on the floor of the tent. Nothing more than expected, however, and all are actually feeling pretty good. The process went smoothly. No birds or people were hurt. No birds got loose inside.
As do most of the rest, Megan walks into the other tent to try to get in a couple hours of sleep. She strips to her long johns, hangs up her gear, and lies down in her sleeping bag. They are planning another cormorant capture before dawn, if the birds return.
Megan Gensler can’t sleep. Her adrenaline is still pumping. Though she isn’t sure yet if anyone saw her trip over the log, her pride is hurt. The propane heater hisses. A couple of others are snoring. The colony just on the other side of the tent’s fabric is quiet again, because the gulls have settled down. She wonders if the cormorants have returned. Megan replays in her head the rush into the dissuasion area—remembering the sideways, green-eyed stare of the cormorant in the beam of her headlamp. She imagines texting a friend. She will describe the whole thing as feeling like some kind of military operation to go abduct aliens.