Looks like "it won't be long, now" until spring arrives here in northwest Ohio. With that, of course, will come the chance to once again take up the warm weather activities many people enjoy.
I don't think most of us are the type to just hunker down and endure winter weather, then come alive again in spring, like a perennial. Maybe we're more like evergreens, some degree of dormancy in winter, but still keeping the appearance of normalcy.
Anyway, spring will arrive again and folks will get active again, including on one of my favorite places, Lake Erie. If you spend much time on or around the lake, you are aware of one of the ecological issues facing it … cormorants.
I remember one afternoon, seeing a large group of the black colored birds swarming over an area of lake water like gnats.
On another occasion, during a sailing lesson, we traveled from Port Clinton to Put-in-Bay, passing near Green Island. From that distance, you can see the damage the birds do to the deciduous vegetation on the island. Their droppings denude the trees, eventually killing them.
Images of Alfred Hitchcock's movie, "The Birds" came to mind.
However, most sportspeople who are concerned about the damage the birds do aren't really too concerned about the trees. They are concerned about the sport fish … the perch, bass and lake trout that attract out-of-area dollars to the lake's western basin.
Now comes a report that the dirty birds may not really impact the sport fishing industry in western Lake Erie.
In an article in the Hamilton Spectator newspaper, writer Eric McGuinness reports on research done by biology professor Jim Quinn, of McMaster University. It includes a great idea on how to spend a summer vacation studying bird barf.
Quinn and his students closely, very closely, examined nearly eleven kilograms (remember, they're Canadian) of cormorant vomit. I'm not sure how much a kilogram is, but I do know that it's a thousand times a gram and even a gram of cormorant chunks should be a lot more than anybody really needs.
McGuinness wrote that the stomachs of 275 cormorant chicks were "palpate(d)" so they would throw up. Quinn's study said that the cormorants (3500 pairs of them) that hang around Hamilton Harbor on the eastern end of Lake Ontario, haven't been eating many sport fish.
Instead, they have been eating junk and pest fish, like alewives, smelt and round gobies. The professor reported that only one salmon-like sample and a few orange bellied sunfish, called "pumpkin seeds," were found.
McGuinness said that someone in the audience at the presentation asked about the damage being done to vegetation by the birds' droppings. Quinn reportedly answered that that may just be something people will have to live with.
He went on to say that removing some nests may be necessary, but not anything drastic. He said that the recent rapid rise in cormorant population in Ontario, (which sounds similar to the increase in western Lake Erie) seems to be leveling off.
Quinn said that the population may have reached a natural ceiling and looks like it's leveling off. He cautioned that aggressively reducing the numbers could just cause an increase in their rate of reproduction.
There's no such thing as simple ecology.