Pennsylvania puts cormorants on hit list

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HARRISBURG (AP) - The black, fish-devouring bird has targeted catfish hatcheries in the South, angered anglers in the Great Lakes and killed every tree on a Vermont island. Now, it has made the mistake of elbowing out two birds on Pennsylvania's endangered list.

Double-crested cormorants practically disappeared 35 years ago, but have returned with a vengeance - with Pennsylvania the latest state to put the shiny black bird on a hit list.

Pennsylvania authorities will take their first stab at killing cormorants on Wade Island in the Susquehanna River, where they want to stop the birds from stealing nesting space from great egrets and black-crowned night herons. The herons have been in sharp decline and the egret population stagnant since cormorants touched down a decade ago on the three-acre island, the largest nesting spot in the state for the two endangered birds.

"It's a means of trying to give the great egret and black-crowned night herons some breathing room," said Jerry Feaser, spokesman for the Pennsylvania Game Commission.

In the coming weeks, federal wildlife sharpshooters will head out to the state-owned island, near Harrisburg, and use air rifles and .silencer equipped 22 rifles to kill up to 50 of the more than 120 cormorants nesting there.

Vermont will be shooting cormorants for the third straight year in an effort to regenerate cottonwoods, white pine and other trees on Young Island in Lake Champlain. The cormorants now shelter amid nettles and thistles on the ground of the six-acre island after killing the trees by stripping them of twigs for nests.

In Great Lakes states, the cormorant population has exploded, competing with anglers for fish such as perch and walleye and hurting tourism. Minnesota is killing cormorants at one of the state's most popular fishing spots, Leech Lake, where the birds are blamed for making the prized walleye harder to catch in the last few years.

In the Great Lakes alone, the cormorant population has rebounded from 89 nests to more than 110,000. "Cormorants went away for a generation of people and now they're back," said Diane Pence, a Fish & Wildlife Service biologist. "And so we have a generation that hasn't experienced the number of cormorants that used to exist."

Pennsylvania wildlife officials tried and failed to lure egrets from Wade Island to a neighboring island two years ago before deciding to kill the cormorants.