If cormorants aren’t actually bad for the environment, can we bear to let them exist?

Reviled as greedy, fish-gobbling, tree-destroyers, cormorants have long had a bad rap. But if these native birds aren’t actually bad for the ecosystem, can we bear to let them exist?

ANDREA CURTIS

I REMEMBER WHEN the cormorants came back. It was the mid 1990s. People around our Georgian Bay cottage said the black waterbirds with the long, snake-like necks were an invasive species eating the perch we like to catch. There was talk about oiling their eggs to limit the population. Since then, double-crested cormorants have become a common sight on our stretch of the bay and elsewhere in cottage country, part of the familiar fauna, mistaken from a distance for the loons with whom they share a love of fish. But, it turns out, they’re not invasive after all. Double-crested cormorants are native to Ontario. The population declined dramatically in the 1960s and ’70s because toxic chemicals, such as DDT (dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane), in the ecosystem thinned the shell of their eggs and…

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Cottage Life (Digital) - 1 Issue, March/April 2025

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