For years, supporters of Ontario’s environment and natural resources have bemoaned funding cuts and other actions that have left the Ministry of Natural Resources — the official defender of our natural assets — toothless and virtually useless.

Now we in the Quinte area have stark — and frankly ugly — evidence of exactly how much impact those changes have had.

One only has to look out from the dock at the Herchimer Street boat launch at what has long been known as Snake Island.

This tiny patch of land with shoals nearby was once home to some of the best walleye and bass fishing in the area. But today, where lush trees and ample vegetation once stood, it is little more than a handful of emaciated trees, a massive white blanket of bird feces and scattered dead wood.

Don Lockey recalls the island’s days of ample fishing stocks and bright foliage fondly. He’s distressed at the state it is in now.

“I’ve been watching it die every year,” said Lockey.

The source of this death and destruction are cormorants — dark, double-crested birds similar in size in some cases to ducks. The waterfowl have been appearing in increased numbers in the Quinte region for the better part of the last decade.

There are multiple issues surrounding the cormorants, which once bordered on extinction, including the smell created by their guano, the toll they’ve taken on fish stocks and safety hazards to boating as a result of their sheer volume.

Yet, the public body expected to defend resources like the island and surrounding fish stocks is doing, well, absolutely nothing.

MNR spokesperson Jolanta Kowalski says as well as having no activity going on to control the cormorant population on the Bay of Quinte, the MNR doesn’t have any plans to cull cormorants or oil eggs in the area in the near future.

“It’s a relatively complicated process. You’ve got to determine what kind of damage is being done to the landscape and whether it’s irrevocably harming that landscape or other animals that might be living there,” she said.

One look should be enough to answer those questions, but apparently the MNR can’t even be bothered looking.

A 2006 private member’s bill put forth by former Prince Edward-Hastings MPP Ernie Parsons asking for an amendment to the Fish and Wildlife Conservation Act to allow private citizens to hunt them year-round never passed. And culls of the bird have been virtually eliminated.

Perhaps allowing open season on cormorants isn’t the best answer. But neither is doing nothing.

The MNR needs to come up with some sort of plan. That’s what we — the taxpayers footing the bill — are paying them for.

via MNR needs to soon act on cormorant issue – Belleville Intelligencer – Ontario, CA.