NO EASY ANSWER TO CORMORANTS

I read with interest Martin Read's article on cormorants in the January Star. It made depressing reading but many of the stories he relates are all too familiar.

But cormorants have been around a bit longer than the last ten years. For my sins I've actually caught five cormorants over the years whilst pike fishing and the first one was from Cheddar reservoir in Somerset in about 1975! Since then I've had one from the Witham, one from the Relief Channel, one from the Thurne, a superb example from our carp lake at Nottingham (Alder Pool) and one from Glaslough in Eire. All this is a steady catch rate of about one every five years! Sadly two of them were badly hooked and had to be dispatched. As far as I'm concerned after what I've seen in the last ten years they are all going to be badly hooked.

Let me give readers some good examples of what they can do to a fishery. For a few years in the eighties I ran a pike fishery at Girton between Gainsborough and Newark. I stocked the water with trout in an attempt to stimulate the situation we see on trout fisheries. The extra food causes the pike to grow bigger and hopefully if all goes well, the syndicate members caught bigger pike. This is in fact what happened and eventually there were about five 20lbs plus pike in the water. One year the pike didn't grow despite stocking 600 lb of rainbow trout and throwing in a lot of waste fish. I didn't twig at first until I noticed 25 cormorants sitting on an electricity pylon just up the road from my lake. Then I started to notice that I was scaring several cormorants every time I visited the fishery. I could not prove it but had the cormorants had it away with my trout? Well next spring I stocked with the same amount of trout but this time I criss-crossed the whole lake with bailer twine. It took a whole day to do this and it looked really stupid. Next autumn when the pike started to get caught they had grown well. The bailer twine had apparently done the trick.

About ten years ago at our carp fishery Alder Pool near Nottingham, we were regularly having to net a lake to remove surplus roach and perch which were inhibiting the growth of the carp. These roach and perch were not doing the pike any harm though, because the pike got to 25lb! Then one winter the cormorants found us and the following summer the roach and perch had been reduced to such a low level that it was difficult if not impossible to catch any for bait The pike eventually lost weight and died. The roach population in particular have never recovered. For us running a carp water the cormorants had done us a favour. The carp have continued to grow, luckily they are cormorant proof!

A friend of mine has a one acre pond in his back garden. The pond is full of carp, or should I say it was full of carp. I used to be able to catch my live baits from it, but since a pair of big black things appeared I struggle. I have had to protect the pond with 20lb mono criss-crossed.

Over in Ireland is a beautiful estate lake which has over the last 100 years produced four pike between 37 and 41 lb and a number of 30 pounders I have fished it several times and though I have had good sport the biggest pike caught is under 25lbs. This had at one stage been a very big pike, possibly 35lb most of the other pike over 15lbs are a bit on the lean side. The one thing the lake does have is plenty of cormorants plus a steady passing trade of black blighters. Circumstantial evidence I know, but get rid of the cormorants and I'm sure things would improve.

On Rutland Water they have so many cormorants that they now have to stock with 2lb plus trout to give them a better chance of survival. When I am pike fishing there it does not seem to have that many coarse fish in it. Coincidence? I'm not sure.

Everywhere you go you hear stories about the damage cormorants have done. It is quite possible that some of these stories have come about because people listen to or read stories in the press. Anglers are among life's natural moaners. I would never take any angler's tale as fact without at first doing a little investigation of my own. The supporters of the cormorant would like to use this to rubbish our stories of what cormorants can do to a fishery. However, even if you discounted half of the stories you'd still have a trail of carnage which would impress the most skeptical of people.

I just hope someone sorts this out so it is much easier to cull the things. I do not shoot so it ought to be left to the people who do to exercise control of them. If 50 per cent of the fisheries in the UK had a shoot to kill policy it would almost certainly exercise some control on these birds. That after all is all that's wanted: some control. They have a right to exist, but not in unlimited numbers.

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