Cormorant Voices from the Grave:
How Abundant Was Pre-Columbian Wildlife?

Written by Barry Kent MacKay


September 20, 2007

Elsewhere I discuss the improbability of cormorants, who eat fish, somehow breeding throughout most of North America, from Alaska to the West Indies and from Labrador to California and Mexico, and somehow missing, near the middle of that vast area, the largest source of fresh water fish – their food – in the entire world – the Great Lakes.  We now know they were once here in large numbers; where did they go?

On another document on this website we discuss in detail two myths which are perpetuated by many North American wildlife managers.  The first myth is that Double-crested Cormorants are now more abundant than they ever were.  The second that they were absent from the Great Lakes where, in fact they are native.  The data available show Double-crested Cormorants were once more abundant than they are now, and they are definitely native to the Great Lakes.

In this essay I’d like to explore organizations and agencies who should know better but who continue to foster myths about Double-crested Cormorant, even when new evidence proves them to be wrong and how difficult it is to undo false impressions created by the myths.

And I would like to address the question posed above; how could such myths ever develop in the first place?  One has to ask the question, if there were once cormorants present in large numbers in the Great Lakes basin and other parts of eastern North America, why did they vanish to the point where they were forgotten, and why was their recovery regarded as an unnatural invasion or unprecedented population explosion instead of being considered a conservation success and the restoration toward natural biodiversity? 

We are accustomed to thinking that myths are features of primitive or poorly educated cultures, perhaps in past times, or “third-world” countries.  We define myths as things that are believed but that we know, for whatever reason, to be untrue.  However they are most certainly believed to be true by those who believe them.

To choose extreme but real examples, there have been people who believe eating parts of someone’s body will instill in them positive characteristics of the deceased; there have been people who believe that if a voodoo doll in their likeness is damaged, they will suffer torments as though their own bodies had been damaged in the same way; there have been people who think the earth is flat, and is the centre of all creation. 

Sometimes there may be grains of truth to what is so easily dismissed by the appropriately educated as nonsense: The cannibal may indeed feel emboldened by virtue of eating his enemy’s heart; there are indications that people have sickened and died soon after learning they have been targeted by voodoo; when standing on a flat plain or sailing a calm sea the earth certainly looks flat, and it certainly appears as though it is stationary within a swirling matrix of stars, including our sun, plus the moon and planets.

But we are taught to analyze more critically what we are told, especially if it is particularly important to us as a society.  However, it is really not so important to society overall that we understand what is known about past population sizes of cormorants, and so it becomes convenient to believe what we are told by people we assume are authorities. 

Why they mislead is too complicated to get into here, beyond saying that it is beneficial to their interests to believe and perpetuate the myth, and so they do.  I think many of them honestly believe the myth that cormorant numbers are unprecedented, and out of control. 

I can’t tell you what myths I currently believe, since if I knew the belief was based on something mythical, or false, I obviously would not hold it.  It is just that because I have believed things in the past that have, I subsequently learned, been untrue, I perhaps tend to look deeper into the things that most interest me.  Santa Clause jumps instantly to mind of an example of how an innocently naïve mind can believe an authoritative source. I think that there presumably are still some things I think are true that are not and a great many that I am uncertain about. 

All of this brings me to a belief I had and only began to dismiss when evidence about previous cormorant numbers began to emerge to the contrary.

Put simply, I’ve more or less held a feeling, a sense, that most larger species of wildlife (birds and mammals in particular) in North America were once more abundant, often staggeringly so, than now, and that there has been a more or less steady decline in the abundance of most species, excepting those that benefit from human activity and anthropogenic (human-caused) changes to the environment, such as crows or perhaps Meadow Voles or Coyotes.  Those species eat many of the things we eat, and, liking open areas, have probably benefited from so much destruction of the original eastern forests.

But things are not that simple.  Wildlife populations can fluctuate, often greatly, and assumptions we may make about wildlife abundance are often just assumptions, and do not necessarily reflect realty.

I had this vague belief that had I been born a hundred years earlier than I was, I, with my passionate interest in birds, would have seen far more of them!  Certainly when I was young, but old enough to look for birds, I saw more than I do now, of certain species. That was in the 1960s and into the 1970s, when every June drive through the countryside just north of Toronto was accompanied by the plaintive song of the Eastern Meadowlark and the sight of Vesper and Savannah Sparrows and beautiful Bobolinks on fence wires or hovering over meadows and filling the air with their bubbling songs. 

Although that’s a subjective view, it is one backed up by actual, objective research that shows that there have been significant declines in several common species of locally native birds, such as the Eastern Meadowlark or the Loggerhead Shrike.  Many birds that live in fields and meadows, from Vesper Sparrows to Northern Bobwhites, are in decline in significant parts of their respective ranges.  There are still lots of Bobolinks, but not the numbers in my own region that I recall not only from childhood, but from just a decade ago. 

Other species, like Mourning Doves, have increased, if not on a continent-wide basis,  at least in the Greater Toronto Region of southern Ontario where I’ve spent most of my life and where they are a protected species year-round.  In some areas they apparently have declined – possibly the fact that more of them are shot than all other North American game birds combined is a contributing factor*. 

House Finches, native to the west but introduced into eastern North America (Long Island, New York, in the 1940s) arrived in southern Ontario, first nesting in 1978, and rapidly built up to huge numbers, and then leveled off, in a classic demonstration of what happens when either a new species arrives and succeeds, or a once reduced species recovers after being reduced to low levels.

But what about other bird species? 

In researching the cormorant I began to examine a book that I have often seen referenced, but never actually read.  It is Birds of Ontario, written by Thomas McIlwraith and published in 1886.  My copy, kindly provided by CDI’s own Julie Woodyer, is the second edition, published in 1894. 

It, and another venerable book I keep close to hand, The Natural History of the Toronto Region, Ontario, Canada, edited by J. H. Faul, and published by The Canadian Institute in 1913, provide a picture of the late 19th century lower Great Lakes that is very different from the present, yes, but also different from an earlier era, which, alas, went largely unrecorded, although in the 18th century there were isolated accounts of birds from Ontario. 

In those days there was little distinction between academia, dilettante nature study and commerce.  As the Hudson’s Bay Company began to establish its forts and fur trade routes into the central and northern Ontario wilderness, observations and collections of specimens began to make their way to scientists in the outside world.  When Humphrey Martin arrived from England to take up residence at York Factory, as a “clerk and steward” for the Hudson’s Bay Company in 1750, he sought with restraint admirable to the times to collect a single specimen of each kind of bird or mammal he encountered, and he wrote down many of his natural history observations.  Those observations were interrupted when he was taken prisoner by the French in 1782.  He was released the following year, and returned to Canada, but ill health forced him back to England.

Thus the first records and specimens of birds from Ontario originated in the north, in the early to mid-18th Century.  It was not until well into the 19th century that we begin to see fragmentary and rather unsatisfying efforts to document avifauna in southern Ontario and the Great Lakes, with the first list of Ontario birds published, in Britain, in 1882.  It’s of little ornithological value, naming only 48 species by colloquial names, some of which we can recognize today, but others naming we know not what species, including the “bat”, which is not even a bird.  Among names recognizable are Common Loon, Wild Turkey and Ruffed Grouse.  Unlike some other parts of the continent, visited by such luminaries as Lewis and Clark, Audubon, Alexander Wilson and a host of other competent observers documenting the fauna of the regions they visited, southern Ontario and the lower Great Lakes remained relatively little studied, as to birds, during the early part of its colonization by predominately European immigrants whose main matter of interest was very often basic survival.  Audubon did reach the American shores of Lakes Erie and Ontario, but not, apparently, the islands where cormorants now nest, and presumably did before, as I shall explain.

There were some ornithological observations made for example, by Catherine Parr Traill, who lived in the Peterborough area in the 1830s and 1840s, and there was the more focused work of Charles Fothergill, a competent British naturalist who settled near Rice Lake, Ontario, in 1816.  His specimen collections, the first truly systematic effort to document birds in southern Ontario, were tragically lost to fire, along with whatever they might have taught us about birds in southern Ontario in the early 19th century, and his plans to publish his observations came to naught.  He died in Toronto in 1840, in poverty.  He was also something of an artist and among the species portrayed in his surviving sketches which is obviously a cormorant, likely a Double-crested Cormorant because Great Cormorants were so rare in the Great Lakes.

As a bird artist I’d be remiss in not making mention of William Pope (1811 – 1902), another Englishman who came to the 19th Century Ontario’s shrinking wilderness, spending most of his life in the bird-rich Long Point area near Lake Erie.  He painted many birds quite skillfully and has been called the Audubon of Upper Canada.  He also kept extensive diaries of his nature observations, and it would be interesting to research them, but I have no copies of anything he wrote.

In 1852 there was a list of birds that wintered in the Toronto area.  Its author, G. W. Allen, states, that it is “…a matter of surprise to many to learn that there are at least 20 species of landbirds which remain with us through the whole of our long winter.”  His observations of Snow Buntings and Black-capped Chickadees have been called possibly the first ornithological paper to appear in a scientific journal in Ontario.

That mid-19th century list contains but a fraction of the number of wintering bird species one would expect someone who had the freedom to roam around relatively pristine wilderness to encounter; areas that are now occupied by streets, apartment complexes, strip malls, shopping centres, factories and refineries, parking lots, airports, sport complexes, roads and highways and all the other invasive urbanization and “development” that exploded through the twentieth century up to the present.

Why is that?  Is it because of the limitations of observers lacking rapid transportation, communication, optical aids, bird guides and birding companions and accumulated knowledge of where to look?  Is it because there really were fewer bird species to be seen?  Certainly several bird species, such as the Northern Cardinal, now wintering in the region, were absent back then, but there really were not enough such species to account for the discrepancy.  Is it because the birds that might have been there had been killed off due to market demand and lack of protection? 

Or could it be a combination of all three factors? 

Probably all three factors are involved, but if so, in what proportions?  I doubt we will ever know, or ever really can know, with anything approaching precision.  But what bothers me, and prompted me to write this, is that there is little or no acknowledgement of the discrepancy between the numbers of birds seen now, compared to then.  Unfortunately one cannot expect the Ministry of Natural Resources or Parks Canada to correct their misconceptions or to conduct what research might shed light on the question.  But wildlife managers have an unfortunate tendency to think what they remember of wildlife populations from their youth represents some sort of “norm”.

Thus the myth which has been, and still is, applied to cormorants, that they are “out of control” and undergoing some sort of unprecedented population explosion that threatens the environment, is fueled, as myths are, by ignorance of (or ignoring) facts.

McIlwraith’s book, late as it occurred relative to European colonization of North America, is the first compilation of birds in Ontario.  He states that breeding Double-crested Cormorants occurred, and produced immense numbers of young. Then as now, they shared nesting habitat with herons, to the harm of neither species.  Then as now they lived on islands in lakes. Then as now, they were assumed to eat “too many” fish. 

But then, unlike now, they bred in remote areas.  They were recognized as native, part of the fauna of the lower Great Lakes, in immense numbers, presumably up to 1894, when the second edition of McIlwraith’s book was published.

But if we look at The Natural History of the Toronto Region, Ontario Canada, published 27 years later, we see that for the Toronto region the Double-crested Cormorant is regarded as an “Irregular migrant, not common.” 

McIlwraith was located in Hamilton, not Toronto, and the Leslie Street Spit, where Toronto’s cormorants currently nest, did not exist.  Instead there was a wonderfully huge cattail marsh – a great habitat for many birds such as Common Moorhens, Black Terns and Least Bitterns now lost to that area, but not where cormorants would nest. 

The summary of cormorants in The Natural History of the Toronto Region, Ontario Canada certainly supports my own view of cormorants before reading Wires and Cuthbert’s important paper, (Wires, Linda A., and Francesca J. Cuthbert, Historic Populations of the Double-crested Cormorant  (Phalacrocorax auritus): Implications for Conservation and Management in the 21st Century, Waterbirds 29(1): 9-37, 2006.) 

We had been told that while Double-crested Cormorants nested from Alaska to Labrador, they were missing as a breeding species in the Great Lakes, east of the Lake of the Woods where, no one disputes, they were common as a breeding species.  Any early records in the Great Lakes would be of uncommon migrants or stray birds from the west.  There were a few published indications of breeding birds recorded by unsophisticated observers, or reflected in place names (see Wires and Cuthert, 2006, opp cit.) but those, I thought in a vague sort of way, would probably be pioneering birds coming east into the Great Lakes, building up to a relatively smaller population that faltered after World War II because of the negative effects of DDT in the environment.

Elsewhere I discuss the improbability that cormorants, who eat fish, were somehow breeding throughout most of North America – from Alaska to the West Indies and from Labrador to California and Mexico – while missing, near the middle of that vast area, the largest source of fresh water fish – their food – in the entire world. 

Could they have been so thoroughly wiped out long before the ravages of DDT? 

You bet. 

How?

A goodly part of the answer to that question is contained in McIlwraith’s book.  It is difficult to imagine just how thoroughly birds, mammals, other wildlife species, trees and various entire habitats, such as the contiguous Carolinian forest that once covered much of southern Ontario, were devastated by European colonizers, often vanishing with little trace or evidence that they ever existed.

If a good natural history library is visited, one will see a plethora of modern books on birds, with more published each year.  But if the library goes all the way back to the time of McIlwraith, or earlier, one sees very few bird books from, say, prior to 1934, the year that Roger Tory Peterson’s Field Guide to the Birds was first published, and nearly all lacking the high quality of illustration or the depths of information to be found in the contemporary literature available to people interested in birds.  And the emphasis of such modern books is on bird-watching, conservation, bird finding, attracting garden birds, photography and art and, well, generally a sense of appreciation of the living bird. 

In contrast, the very first section after the Introduction in McIlwraith’s book, is entitled, “Collecting and Preparing Specimens.” 

It begins: “Since it is possible that the perusal of these pages may create in some of my younger readers the desire to collect and preserve specimens of the birds whose history they have been considering, I would advise them, by all means, to cultivate the taste, for I know of no pastime so conducive to health, nor one that will afford so much rational enjoyment.” 

The term “collect” in this context means to kill the bird so it may be preserved for future reference and study.  This used to be the primary means of studying birds, and understandably so given the lack of other ways to learn about birds at that time, or even identifying them.  But one can’t imagine a modern bird book starting out by encouraging its readers to go out and kill birds.  Indeed now, unlike then, it would be illegal for people to do so.

Further into the text, he states, “Since bird collecting can be successfully practiced only by the use of the gun, let me here, for the guidance of beginners, repeat the directions so often given to guard against accidents in its use.”  His entire tutorial on gun safely is contained within the same paragraph.

After recommending the choice of gun, he states, “The collector going into the country may unexpectedly meet with some very desirable bird, and should be prepared to take it, whatever be its size or shape, and to do so with the least possible injury to its plumage.”  He goes on to discuss shot sizes.  “I find,” he says, “that a warbler killed by a single pellet of No. 12, is in better condition to make into a specimen that is killed with a dozen pellets of dust.”  In this case “dust” is the name given to an even finer shot, made for the killing of very small birds like wrens, kinglets and hummingbirds, as well as warblers.

“Having reached home,” McIlwraith states, “the collector divests himself of his muddy boots, gets a pair of slippers and a change of coat, and sets himself to work to prepare his specimens.”  How that is done fills the next few pages. 

The next chapter is entitled “Nests and Eggs”.  It begins with the assertion that next in importance to having specimens of the birds, themselves, “…is a collection of nest and eggs.  By this I do not mean simply an accumulation of nests and eggs, the number of which constitutes the value of the collection, but a carefully handled nest, and a correctly identified set of eggs of every bird known to breed within the district over which the collector extends his observations.”  He then tells how to do that.

Please understand that I’m not judging McIlwraith’s values or suggesting for a moment that scientific collecting of birds and nests to be preserved for documentation and future study, even at the dilettante level being advocated by McIlwraith, was in any real way responsible for the low numbers of birds that, as I will discuss below.  Rather, I wish to illustrate how very different were the attitudes of his day, and the virtually total lack of any laws or ethical concerns to limit or prevent the killing of wildlife in any number whatsoever, or any concerns about the impact of killing on the species.

It was an era hardly imaginable today.  It was an era of vast market hunting, when a trip to the store would provide not a row of uniform, plucked and gutted chicken carcasses steam-bleached, trussed, shrink-wrapped and flash frozen to be presented to the buyer in an open freezer, but rather, freshly shot wild birds of any species more or less deemed edible, obtained by people who made their living killing native wildlife, and hung in rows along with domestic species raised in small numbers, to be picked over by the discerning shopper. 

Typically market hunting is described in terms of North America’s most abundant bird species.  Well, it was the most abundant species at the time that market hunting was at its peak, leading up to, and including, McIlwraith’s time.  I will quote Buzz Williams of the Chattooga Conservancy, whose description is as good as any:

“Astronomical numbers of birds were sold in the markets of large northern cities. New technology such as the telegraph and railroads aided the growing market-hunting trade. Passenger Pigeons dressed and packed on ice in barrels, at the rate of 25 to 35 dozen per barrel, could be shipped from New York to Chicago in 48 hours. The birds were sold for 50 cents per dozen, or 12 cents for a pound of feathers, with approximately 50 pigeons producing a pound of feathers. They were sold door to door in carts or in the market, either broiled, roasted, pickled, smoked or salted. Sometimes the birds were stuffed with charcoal as a preservative. Squabs were marketed as a delicacy.

“Market-hunting was a huge business. The hunters used an amazing array of techniques to bring down the birds when massed in flocks. They netted, shot and swatted the birds with long hickory poles; they even used whips. Passenger Pigeon flocks were so thick that hunters often killed 20 to 30 birds per shot. They burned sulfur pots to fumigate roosting pigeons, and poked down nests with poles to get the squabs. In one instance, 1,500 acres of trees were cut down to get to the helpless young birds. Sometimes there were as many as 100 nests per tree. Unbelievably, hunters sometimes even used fireworks to bring down pigeons. The killing frenzy was once described as “a wild pandemonium for a saturnalia of slaughter.”

“In 1878, one of the last great flocks of Passenger Pigeons nested in Michigan. By then some activists were lobbying for laws to limit hunting and to stop nest raiding. The market hunters countered by arguing that the protesters did not care about the poor. Some scholars believe that as many as 10 million birds were harvested in that single nesting kill. In 1886, only two flocks of Passenger Pigeons were left in Oklahoma and Pennsylvania. By 1897, when Michigan finally passed a law banning the killing of Passenger Pigeons, it was already too late. Passenger Pigeons had depended on large numbers to locate food and to thrive, but by now their numbers had fallen precipitously. Habitat had been destroyed and nesting patterns disturbed. At the turn of the century, a young boy shot a lone bird in a tree in Pike County, Ohio; it was the last Passenger Pigeon known to have been shot in the wild.”

But no less poignant is the history of another abundant bird, the Eskimo Curlew, a sandpiper that once migrated from the Arctic to South America down the east coast, and returned up through the prairies the following spring, in huge numbers.  From the proceedings of the Boston Society of Natural History for 1906 – 7 we read:

“…Formerly an abundant but now a very rare autumn transient visitor in Labrador.

When August comes if on the Coast you be,

Thousands of fine Curlews, you’ll daily see.

“Packard writes of the curlew as follows:  `On the 10th of August, 1860, the curlews appeared in great numbers.  We saw one flock which may have been a mile long and nearly as broad; there must have been in that flock four or five thousand…But we met with none during our visit to the Labrador coast in the summer of 1906.  We talked with many residents and they all agreed that the curlew though formerly very abundant, suddenly fell off in numbers, so that now only two or three or  none at all might be seen in a season.  Capt. Parsons of the mailboat Virginia Lake said that they were very abundant up to thirty years ago.  He often shot a hundred before breakfast, often killing twenty at a single discharge.  Fishermen killed them by the thousands…They kept loaded guns at their fish stages and shot into the flying masses, often bringing down twenty or twenty-five at a single shot.’”

While kids on the east coast could fetch six pennies per dead bird, on the prairies the birds were shot in numbers far greater than were “needed” for food, and piles were left to rot on the ground, not unlike the fate of the bison, also ruthlessly slaughtered, and often wasted, during the same era.

A few years ago I joined a small team to search for the Eskimo Curlew in areas it had been seen in northern Newfoundland, and in southern Labrador and the North Shore of extreme eastern Quebec, where Audubon found the species during his visit in 1837.  We found none, and the general consensus among conservationists is that the Eskimo Curlew slipped into extinction sometime in the last half of the 20th Century.

Largely forgotten was the massive trade in skins and feathers of birds for use as decorations by the fashion industry. It rivaled the fur trade in economic importance.  To quote Barbara and Richard Mearns in their book, The Bird Collectors (Academic Press, 1998):

…the women of Western Europe and North America were responsible for the worst exploitation of wild birds for their plumage.  During the late eighteenth to early nineteenth centuries it was the fashion for women to wear hats decorated not just with feathers, but often with wings, or heads, or even the whole bodies of birds.  In Britain the plumage industry was an important part of the national economy and it has been estimated that from 1870 to 1920 twenty thousand tons of ornamental plumage entered the country each year.  The most popular species were herons and egrets (for ‘osprey’ plumes), birds of paradise, cock o’ the rocks, parrots, toucans, trogons and hummingbirds.  In London, which was the centre of the trade, one dealer sold two million wild bird skins in just one year.

[Drawing on Mearns and Mearns and other sources I once wrote an essay on this subject: see (A Little About) Fur and (A Lot About) Feathers: The Animals Cruelty No One Talks About...Or Remembers (Feb 19, 1998)]

The point I am trying to drive home is that during the 19th century, and earlier, as well as continuing into the 20th century, killing birds for whatever reasons, or for no real reason, was an accepted pastime to a degree that would be unthinkable in North America today and in numbers that could not have helped but have an impact, in many instances a massive impact, on sizes of bird populations, wiping out several North American species altogether. Again quoting from Mearns and Mearns:

This is not the place for a complete litany of the unnecessary slaughter, so the once common practice of shooting North American nighthawks will serve as a sad example.  The Common Nighthawk was killed in huge numbers during migration, particularly in the southern states, just for target practice.  In 1885 Dr. Sterlling wrote that, “Their rapid and irregular flight makes them a difficult mark for the young sportsman to practice on, as he never fails to make a target when the opportunity offers.  I can now understand the object for which the bird was created.”

That was in McIlwraith’s time.  I think it is safe to say that most of us don’t think these beautiful, insectivorous birds whose “irregular flight” serves their need to capture aerial insects exist only for target practice, and they are now protected by law.

The same book talks of hunting directed against actual game birds.  Among various European sportsman, the European record is held by Lord Ripon, who set a one-day record of 240 Grey Partridges shot in a single drive [a practice where beaters drive birds toward waiting sportsmen, a practice still enjoyed by the likes of Prince Philip on the Scottish moors]…His total game tally for the years 1862 – 1923 reached a staggering 556,813; three quarters being composed of Red Grouse, Pheasants and Grey Partridges, with the remainder being [Eurasian] Woodcock, Common Snipe, ducks, hares and a sprinkling of Tigers, rhinos and other sundry unfortunates. 

And just as the Ontario Federation of Anglers and Hunters wants to see cormorants deprived of protection so they may be killed as vermin, so did hunters of earlier eras consider birds of prey.  Because bounty payments were given out, we know that, as documented by Mearns and Mearns, “In Norway from 1846 – 1900 rewards were paid for 223,487 raptors, which included 61,157 Golden Eagles and White-tailed Eagles in the twenty-three years up to 1869, dropping to 27,329 eagles in the twenty-nine years from 1870 – 1899.”

Lest we think this lunacy was confined to the Old World, or mostly to the 19th Century, the Mearns report that in Alaska, from 1917 to 1952, bounties were paid for the bodies of no less than 128,273 Bald Eagles, a species now so protected that you can go to jail or be significantly fined if you possess so much as a molted feather in the absence of official government permission in the form of a permit.  The U.S. only recently removed it from the endangered species list.

 From the book, Eighteenth-Century Naturalists of the Hudson Bay, by C. Stuart Houston, Tim Ball and Mary Houston (2003) we learn that, “…following more than a century of gun use by natives and whites alike, the swan flight into James Bay had almost disappeared by 1783-85.” 

They would have mostly been killed for food since the value of their skins in international commerce had yet to be established.  Since the trade did not distinguish between the two native swan species, the Trumpeter and the smaller Tundra (formerly “Whistling”) Swans, we can’t be sure of the numbers of either species, but we do know that the larger Trumpeter was, by the beginning of the 20th Century, close to extinction.  In early 19th Century it was the more common of the two species, but that changed, perhaps in part because the Trumpeter Swan’s nesting range was generally more accessible to people with firearms than that of the more northern Tundra Swan. 

By 1935, only 69 Trumpeter Swans were known to exist in the wild for sure, although we now know that there were also undetected small flocks in parts of Alaska and Alberta. 

The trade in skins, which saw nearly 8,000 swan skins reach the market in London, England, in 1834 alone (the peak year), declined over the following decades.  It is highly doubtful that the skin trade alone, normally well under 5,000 per year and dwindling off to a few hundred or less in the third and fourth quarters of the 19th Century, accounted for the endangerment of the species.  But the attitude that any and all birds could be shot for any reason, or no real reason, certainly did contribute to enormous losses.  And it was this attitude that is reflected in so much of the literature of the time, including McIlwraith.

In a general sort of way I knew such things, prior to reading McIlwraith.  I knew, too, that unlike other species of birds wiped out, cormorants were not edible, thus unlikely to show up in kitchen middens, where we find the bones of other vanished, but edible species, including Passenger Pigeons.  I knew that their plumes or skins were, unlike those of pretty songbirds, swans or egrets, not in trade, so they would not show up in various documents pertaining to commerce.  They were not urban or village birds likely to show up in the writings of some of the early diarists, nor so widely distributed as to be impossible to ignore.  They were there…McIlwraith saw them and saw “immense numbers” of breeding birds…but why is there an assumption that somehow they have just magically appeared as an intrusive breeding species in the lower Great Lakes?

I am not an historian, but I am a naturalist and as such was struck rather forcibly by how much rarer other birds were, by the time of McIwraith, than now.  I think the reason I was surprised is that we tend to underestimate just how damaging the unregulated destruction of birds really was, prior to, say, 1916, when the Migratory Birds Convention Act was passed to enforce the protection of migratory birds decided on during the Migratory Birds Convention, two years earlier.  The Act, incidentally, did not provide protection for such “bad” migratory birds as hawks, owls and, of course, cormorants. 

Elsewhere, [see: Do Hunters Pay Their Way? (January 29, 2004)] I explore some of the early history of conservation, particularly in North America, and the motivation that led to halting, or at least reducing, the carnage of North American birds (cormorants excepted), but in a nutshell, with several species nearly or quite extinct, and with virtually  no species safe, something had to be done. 

Far from the nearly pristine environment I envisioned as existing where I live, in the lower Great Lakes, a century ago, it was, it appears, quite different.  Assuredly most of the vast displacement of habitat that resulted from the current infrastructure of cities, highways, farms, factories and the like that we now see, and most of the toxins now so prevalent in the environment, and such concerns as acid rain or ozone depletion or climate change or the presence of so many alien species, and their various effects on native wildlife, all had yet to occur.  But the unchecked use of guns and traps had, for many species, an even greater effect, judging from the observations of McIlwraith.

In his accounts of various “game” bird species that now breed within the region tramped by McIlwraith in his “muddy boots”, he makes it clear that they bred in “remote” areas in his time.  Let’s discuss just some of the ducks. 

The Hooded Merganser (which are nesting, as I type, in a bird box mounted over a pond in the front yard of a friend of mine, just a few kilometers away) is described as being “regular” in winter, but having “remote” nesting grounds;

American (now Common) Merganser is a species found nesting in nearly every lake in cottage country and beyond and is abundant in winter, often seen in flocks on open waters in Lake Ontario and other Great Lakes, but in McIlwraith’s time, it was “…never plentiful, being a bird of the sea coast…usually seen singly or in pairs…” but, although every cottager who goes boating and is alert to his or her surroundings must have seen a hen merganser trailing her brood of downy young, McIlwraith “never observed this bird on still water during the breeding season…”;

Red-breasted Merganser (which, like the preceding two species, is not a very desirable “game” species because of its rank meat) was at least referred to as “common” in North America, but locally “…they occur in small flocks” wrote McIlwraith, along the southern border of Ontario, but  none are observed to remain over the winter.”;

Mallard, now an extremely abundant nesting species in urban areas, McIlwraith records, as though it were an anomaly, a single instance of nesting, near some farm ducks;

American Black Duck, now another abundant nesting species in urban areas and one of the most common breeding species of duck throughout the province, in McIlwraith’s day it “…was a regular visitor to the marshy inlets around Hamilton Bay, but now there is so much to disturb, and so little to attract them, that their visits are few and far between,” and at Hudson’s Bay, where it is now common, “…only rare stragglers have been noticed.”;

Gadwall, now an abundant species nesting along Toronto’s waterfront, and easily seen accepting handouts in the winter (with a tad more decorum than the Mallards and American Black Ducks) it was, in McIlwraith’s time, “…rare throughout Ontario,” but, “…when a large mixed lots of ducks is sent down in the fall form any of the shooting stations in the west, a pair or two of this species may sometimes be picked out, but that is all.”.  He, himself, had but a single pair in his collection, “…shot in Hamilton Bay many years ago, but since that time I have not heard of any having been obtained there.”  In a similar reference book on the province of Manitoba, only a single specimen was known, shot in 1881.

American Wigeon (“Baldpate”); This species, at least, McIlwraith describes as “abundant” even in his time, but not so abundant that he could find any provincial breeding records.  It now breeds in virtually every part of the province.

Green-winged Teal; This species, too, was common in McIwraith’s time, as it is now, but in his day it appeared to breed only in the north, whereas now it breeds in Central Ontario.  They were, according to citation McIlwraith gives from Alaska, “…the least suspicious of the ducks, probably because the Eskimo usually consider them too small to waste a charge of powder and shot upon.”  That, their rapidly darting flight, and the inaccessibility of northern breeding grounds, must have helped them to survive.

Let me assure you that I understand that nowadays, while there is much less suitable habitat for many such birds than in McIlwraith’s day, there are vastly more qualified observers in the field, with far superior training and equipment and greatly more references and mobility, as well as superior protection for the birds, themselves. 

And yet, I assert that my hypothesis holds true, because when we go back still further, into the era of Audubon (1785 – 1851), Alexander Wilson (1761 – 1813) or still earlier luminaries, we find vastly more birds being recorded.   However it is important to note that even then there is indication that the Double-crested Cormorant was seriously in decline in the east, although there was (beyond a reduction of fish due to overfishing) little or no loss of suitable habitat.  Audubon failed to find and record it when he did visit inland areas, including the shores of Lakes Erie and Ontario, and in areas of the U.S. north and mid-Atlantic coast, where it now again, breeds.  Such losses do not hold true for all species.  The clearing of the contiguous forests of eastern North America in through the 18th and 19th century, for example, would have opened up field habitat for many species (the Brown-headed Cowbird coming to mind – in Wilson’s day it was a prairie bird, but is now abundant in the east).  Mallards may be more common in southern Ontario now than in McIlwraith’s time because they were constantly introduced here by hunting interests, and forest habitat more suitable for American Black Ducks was replaced by fields that were better suited for Mallards.  

And then there is the Chestnut-sided Warbler.  In all his endless ramblings across so much of North America, Audubon found it only once, in Pennsylvania, when he shot five in a single day in 1808.  It is now considered to be an abundant migrant. 

The difference in birds seen by McIlwraith compared to what modern observers see that struck me most forcefully was with regard the shorebirds – sandpipers and plovers – so many of which relatively rare in McIlwraith’s time, and many of which are still considered to be rarer than they ought to be, given the amount of breeding habitat available to them.  But they, too, were considered game birds (and still are, in much of their wintering range in South America and the West Indies, where indiscriminate shooting still occurs). 

Many songbird populations were probably of similar or greater numbers then as now, and discrepancies between what McIlwraith saw and what we might now encounter would derive from a variety of factors having nothing to do with the number shot for fun or profit. 

If, in the early 19th Century, Audubon had gone just a tad further than the American shorelines of the lower Great Lakes, and visited the islands of Lake Erie and Lake Ontario, or Hamilton Bay or Prince Edward County or Rice Lake in Ontario, would he have found nesting Double-crested Cormorants?

Maybe, but possibly not, not because they would not nest in such places, and not because they were mysteriously absent, but because even that early in European settlement of eastern North America there had been more than ample time to wipe out such colonies, and the same incentives to do so that drive the contemporary desire to reduce cormorant numbers here and abroad.  It is not that they were entirely missing.  McIlwraith saw them, recorded that they bred, and did so in “immense numbers”.  Before him, Fothergill sketched one, somewhere in Ontario (probably Rice Lake, where they are once more established and where Fothergill made most of his observations) and it is unlikely that he sketched the only one there was. 

Had McIlwraith known that, some 120 years later, someone like me would be interested in knowing exactly where he saw his “immense flocks” of young cormorants he might have been more specific.  But he was specific enough to say they were “…on islands in the lakes and ponds and almost impenetrable marshes…” 

By “islands in the lakes” does he mean islands in the lower Great Lakes, where he lived?  And if so, is it possible that the birds were wiped out early enough to allow subsequent forest growth, the production of trees that otherwise would not have been there?  He said they nested in “remote” areas, and even in modern times, the uninhabited islands of Lake Ontario and Lake Erie are “remote” to most of us.  They could not have survived in areas not remote, nor, ultimately, in more remote areas, either.

I see absolutely no reason why not, and every reason to think that yes, at some time prior to the publication of McIlwraith’s book, at least, and possibly at that time, cormorants of course nested where you would expect them to nest, on islands of the Great Lakes, feeding from an abundance of fish never to be seen again, and excreting into soil that would be enriched enough to sustain the tree growth that we now see on some of these islands. 

McIlwraith would have had no way of knowing that some time in the not-so-distant future someone like me (but not the Ontario Ministry of Natural Resources, Parks Canada or the Ontario Federation of Hunters and Anglers) would hunger for more detail. 

As I write this Parks Canada is gearing up to kill cormorants on Middle Island, located in the southernmost reaches of Lake Erie.  Oh, Parks Canada is going through the motions of consultation, but they have already applied for a permit to “compost” the birds they obviously plan to kill.  We know that Middle Island, Lake Erie was inhabited for centuries, since before the arrival of Europeans with their guns, and at any time during that occupation, either by the aboriginal members of the First Nations or by Europeans and their descendents, the birds could easily have been wiped out as a nesting species on all of the islands in the Great Lakes, especially if, during that time, they were being wiped out elsewhere in adjoining jurisdictions, as seems so very likely. 

McIlwraith cites very few sources for the information he provides, and does so for two very obvious reasons:  First, there were very few sources for such information, and second, he lived at a time when proof of the occurrence of a species of bird, or of its breeding, was expected to be backed up by actual specimens.  That required expertise of the kind McIlwraith promoted at the beginning of his book. 

So whether or not fishermen or others found cormorants nesting on any specific location would not likely to be included in the information he provided in the absence of the all-important specimens (and we can be fairly confident that any cormorants found would be killed, but not preserved). 

In his description of the Ivory Gull, there is indication that McIlwraith may, not surprisingly, have lacked the ability to visit islands too far off shore to be reached by a dory or canoe.  “Having received interesting accounts from fishermen of pure white gulls following their boats out on the lake,” he wrote, “I tried in vain for two seasons to persuade them to take my large single gun, and bring me a specimen.”

Presumably wintering gulls were not seen as hazard to fish, and fishermen out on the lake had better things to do that serve the interests of ornithology by looking for and shooting rare birds to be turned over to Mr. McIlwraith.  “Finally,” continued McIlwraith, “I got them to attach a long line to the stern of one of the boats, with a hook at the end, baited with a ciscoe, and in this way they succeeded in getting me a fine adult male of the Ivory Gull, the only one I ever attained.”  That specimen was lost, and given the lack of reference materials McIlwraith might have mistaken it for the Iceland Gull.  We just don’t know, but not for lack of enthusiasm naturalists had for preserving specimens.

The kind of attitude currently held by a vocal minority against cormorants has previously, and to a greatly decreased extent still is been held with regard many other kinds of birds.  Some, like the hawks, suffered serious declines both as a result of persecution, and as a result of environmental contamination, as did the cormorant.  But the Double-crested Cormorant, in disappearing altogether from the Great Lakes and other parts of eastern North America, might seem extreme compared to such a decline, until we consider the issue of vulnerability

The Carolina Parakeet was a lovely little bird with a bright yellow and red head and green body and was native to the southeastern U.S.  We will probably never know if it ever occurred in Ontario, but it almost certainly did.  Its range was no different from that of other species of birds which, although concentrated in the south-eastern U.S., still do, from time to time, occur in Ontario.  If such species as the American Oystercatcher, Purple Gallinule, Bewick’s Wren, Chuck-will’s-widow, Scissor-tailed Flycatcher, Carolina Chickadee, Painted Bunting, Blue Grosbeak, Summer Tanagers and other species normally found in more southern climes have shown up in Ontario, surely the Carolina Parakeet would have done so from time to time as well.  This charming bird had two strikes against it: it was desirable as a cage bird, as all parrots seem to be, and so without regulations or restrictions to protect it, many were caught and kept as pets. Much worse, it was a pest and also, like any colourful bird, shot for the feather trade, although a photo I have of one such unfortunate bird, shows that the lovely colours were first dyed black before turning it into an ornament.  Like cormorants, these parakeets made themselves very unpopular with people.  They did not eat fish, but they ate grain and fruit, and destroyed the productivity of orchards.  And so they were shot in large numbers and were exterminated sometime in the first half of the 20th century.

Double-crested Cormorants were not, in spite of best efforts, exterminated, and unlike the parakeet, but contrary to the impression many folks seem to have, they were recorded in the lower Great Lakes in the 19th century, but no later.  As breeding birds they were wiped out, if not as thoroughly as the Carolina Parakeet, to the degree that the assumption seems to be they were never here as a breeding species in the first place. 

There is one huge difference between cormorants and parakeets, although there is also an important similarity.  The difference is that cormorants, unlike parakeets, nest in colonies in relatively few locations and don’t swarm over farmers’ fields.  The parakeets nested in tree cavities, and thus were spread out over large areas, although attracted to agriculture.

Both were highly vulnerable.  The parakeet’s vulnerability stemmed from the ease by which it could be killed.  On April 8, 1834, explorer John K. Townsend wrote about the parakeets, saying, “They seemed entirely unsuspicious of danger, and after being fired at only huddled closer together, as if to obtain protection from each other, and as their companions are falling all around them, they curve down their necks and look at them fluttering upon the ground, as though perfectly at a loss to account for so unusual an occurrence…” 

Alexander Wilson noted how wounded birds tended to attract their healthy flock mates to their own doom.  From his own experience shooting the birds, he wrote, “The whole flock swept repeatedly around their prostrate companions and again settled in a low tree, within twenty yards of the spot where I stood.  At each successive discharge, though showers of them fell, yet the affection of the survivors seemed rather to increase…”

Both these sad accounts are contained in the highly recommended book, Hope is the Thing with Feathers, by Christopher Cokings, Most Tarcher/Putnam Books, 2000.

The accounts are no sadder than those of my colleagues who watched the killing of cormorants at Presqu’ile Provincial Park, in 2006.  “When the cormorants have eggs, or newly hatched young,” said Rob Laidlaw, “they would make sure that one or the other, if not both, was always in attendance at the nest.  We would watch as volleys of shot were fired, causing chaos as cormorants and herons and gulls and terns all flew up and around in fear and confusion, while those cormorants who were hit would fall to the ground or water, or hang from the nest or tree branches, some dead, others wounded.  But then the survivors would eventually return.  Several times we saw and photographed one cormorant of a pair attending the nest while the mate’s dead body hung from the same nest, tangled up in the sticks or rotting on top of the nest.” [see video.]

The fact is that the sole cormorant of a pair with eggs or young is unlikely to be able to raise a family.  While one bird is off fishing, the other must protect the eggs or young from the elements.  Just shooting one of a pair is all that is needed to prevent a family from happening.  So, in their own way, the cormorants are as vulnerable as the parakeets were to the level of destruction required to wipe them out.  They, just like the parakeets, seem to be “perfectly at a loss to account for so unusual an occurrence” as their mates shot dead, and are compelled by nurturing instincts to attend their eggs or young, and thus be shot, themselves.  And they are concentrated, during the breeding season, in a relatively few sites.

When the first cormorants, at least in modern times, began to nest at Presqu’ile Provincial Park, the young were killed, illegally, by persons unknown and placed in weighted burlap bags that were sunk into the waters of Lake Ontario.  But they weren’t all weighted enough and some washed ashore, to be found and photographed by park naturalist, Doug McRae.  Of course we know that the “persons unknown” were almost certainly local fishermen who, then as now, hated cormorants. 

But as I hope I have shown, the concept of them being alien as a breeding species in the lower Great Lakes is countered by the evidence at hand.  It is possible that somewhere in some 18th or 19th century diary, or news story, or letter, in some archive or other, a solid reference to them breeding in Lake Erie or Lake Ontario exists, unnoticed because no one with the appropriate interest has looked, or had the resources for such research. 

But surely the notion that these birds somehow didn’t enter the Great Lakes, east of Lake of the Woods, until the 20th Century is absurd, and contrary to the evidence that does exist, however much I wish there were more, and contrary to common sense, as well.  This is a native bird, and its success is a conservation triumph that should be celebrated, not condemned. 

During the time I was typing this, the American Ornithologists Union, the most venerable and eminent body of ornithologists on the continent, came out with their own research, showing that the Double-crested Cormorant is not a hazard to fish species or trees or herons, or “out of control” or a serious threat to social interests.  As well, ever more evidence is emerging that the species is leveling off in numbers, as is inevitable, if they are left alone.  But it may not matter so long as hatred of the birds is driven by emotion, in ignorance or contempt of facts based on sound, scientific principles. 

-30-

*Estimated kill rates for doves banded in hunting states were more than six times greater than those for doves banded in the Unit's non-hunting states". Banding research also indicates a higher 20 to 30 percent overall kill rate and banding returns suggest that legal hunter kill "may run as high as 50 to 60 percent on local juvenile doves during the early season". Although not known precisely, nationwide hunting mortality, statistically averaged to include non-hunting states, is conservatively estimated between 10 to 15 percent of the annual population. "However, estimates for the EMU suggest that hunting mortality accounts for a much higher percentage of the total annual mortality of doves from hunting states than for the Unit as a whole and this percentage was much larger for the EMU hunting states than for states in the other management Units". Banding data for EMU "hunting states accounted for an estimated 30.0 percent of the annual mortality of immature doves and for 26.4 percent of the adult annual mortality".