Rise of the lake raiders
Thirty years ago, with increasing frequency, squadrons of black seabirds were spotted on Lake Champlain flying low and fast across the water as if on some sort of black-ops raiding mission. Their appearance was something of an environmental success that, in the eyes of many, quickly turned into an environmental catastrophe.
The same scene was playing out on the Great Lakes and the Pacific, as the double-crested cormorant made a miraculous recovery after the ban on DDT, a pesticide that had once imperiled the bird’s existence. But while conservationists hailed the return of birds such as the bald eagle, they became increasingly wary of the collateral success represented by the cormorant.
As the population surged, once-lush Lake Champlain islands were one-by-one commandeered and summarily defoliated by the cormorants, whose populations had exploded from a single nesting pair into a population that peaked at more than 20,000. Anglers fretted as well, as cormorants slurped down tons of fish, most notably the yellow perch that is an important
