Cormorants in the 1960s

David Rogers 3 · May 29, 2018

We tend to think of the "cormorant problem" as a relatively recent issue of concern to anglers, but I've just been reading through some issues of the old Fishing magazine and come across an interesting editorial dated March 8th, 1963.

Apparently the Severn River Board at that time was offering 10 shillings for each cormorant shot on their waters - "several hundred" of the birds were appearing each spring on the upper Severn and Teme and potentially scoffing their own weight in trout and salmon smolts every day.

The response had been disappointing, though - fewer than a dozen ten bob notes were claimed during the whole of the previous year (1962).

It appears that cormorants (in common with all predators) have always taken advantage of rich pickings, and the present numbers of the birds coming inland hasn't only had to do with the scarcity of prey around the coast.

tigger · May 29, 2018

As a young kid in the late 60's early 70's I can remember seeing cormorants just as often as I do today!
They've always been there but as soon as a few loud mouthed anglers have a few blanks or quiet sessions they use their big gobs to persecute something for it and then the majority of other fools jump on the witch hunt!

lutra · May 29, 2018

tigger said:
As a young kid in the late 60's early 70's I can remember seeing cormorants just as often as I do today!
They've always been there but as soon as a few loud mouthed anglers have a few blanks or quiet sessions they use their big gobs to persecute something for it and then the majority of other fools jump on the witch hunt!

And I shouldn’t think numbers weren’t that good in the sixties and seventies. Wasn’t a great time for most things higher up the food chain with all the poisons being used. Maybe if we could look back even further, we may see that numbers are even low today.

tigger · May 29, 2018

lutra said:
And I shouldn’t think numbers weren’t that good in the sixties and seventies. Wasn’t a great time for most things higher up the food chain with all the poisons being used. Maybe if we could look back even further, we may see that numbers are even low today.

Yeaph, your prolly right Brian.

How you doin anyhow?...not heard off you in yonks!

reabrook · May 29, 2018

I remember seeing plenty of cormorants every winter along the Severn in the 60’s and 70’s. This winter just gone I visited a section of the river I’d not been to in decades. There is an old stump that the cormorants always sat on with outstretched wings. Unbelievably it was still there but the Cormorants had been replaced with a huge raft of Goosanders. I grew up there and had never before seen them on the river. It’s not an ideal stretch for such birds being incredibly deep and slow moving. I doubt very much the target prey back then or now was game fish. Funnily enough a few weeks before going I’d phoned an old friend who’d told me the area had seen a resurgence of dace and roach all through that stretch of river.

daniel121 · Jun 3, 2018

I've always said that cormorants were the scapegoat regarding the demise of river fishing. There was far more likely reasons for the changes but as your not catching much anglers looked about and started to notice things they would normally miss.

Enter the scapegoat for the bad days fishing, if its not the truth its a good excuse. ?

laguna · Jun 3, 2018

When I was a kid, there were a lot more 'sustainable' levels of fish in rivers thanks in part to regular stocking policies where thousands of anglers lined the banks. Now the vast majority only fish commercials and predation seems to have taken its toll on any remaining river stocks.

lutra · Jun 3, 2018

laguna said:
When I was a kid, there were a lot more 'sustainable' levels of fish in rivers thanks in part to regular stocking policies where thousands of anglers lined the banks. Now the vast majority only fish commercials and predation seems to have taken its toll on any remaining river stocks.

Can't say have seen any hard evidence (first hand or second hand) that silver fish numbers in rivers are widely in a bad way. What do you base your findings on Chris?

lutra · Jun 3, 2018

tigger said:
Yeaph, your prolly right Brian.

How you doin anyhow?...not heard off you in yonks!

Not bad thanks Ian, but maybe better in a couple of weeks when we can drown some maggots in the river again. You?

tigger · Jun 4, 2018

lutra said:
Not bad thanks Ian, but maybe better in a couple of weeks when we can drown some maggots in the river again. You?

Glad your doin ok B

.

I just keep gooin wit yed down B.

Mark Wintle · Jun 4, 2018

Massive amount of evidence that cormorants have destroyed many stretches of my local rivers and stillwaters. The vast shoals of big roach are long gone with the odd pocket of big fish but some stretches have virtually no fish at all. Up to the late 70s the beak bounty kept cormorant numbers down to less than 10 in Poole harbour, now in the 100s affecting not just dace and roach numbers but also flounders less than 1% of what they once were. Not a scapegoat but a proved fish annihilator.

laguna · Jun 4, 2018

lutra said:
Can't say have seen any hard evidence (first hand or second hand) that silver fish numbers in rivers are widely in a bad way. What do you base your findings on Chris?

50 years personal experience and knowledge of the industry. Not just silvers, all species have declined.
There's certainly a lot less fish in my rivers here in Yorkshire when I first started.
The re-wilding initiatives don't help, but to be fair they wouldn't have had that much of an effect if the stocks had been replenished - but with fewer fish being stocked these days, it's easy to see why the reintroduction of apex predators like mink (released by activists in Yorkshire) and otter eating their way through the remaining fish get the blame.

*your river(s) may have better stocking and/or fewer predators. You're lucky.

steve2 · Jun 6, 2018

Cormorant numbers across Europe have greatly increased since the 1960’s. In the case of one species numbers in the 1960’s were estimated at 4000 pairs at the last count that stood at around 200,000. With large numbers of these now moving inland for easy pickings from manmade fisheries and inland waterways.
If you want to find out more about their numbers read

EU Cormorant Platform - Nature - Environment - European Commission

rob48 · Jun 6, 2018

Some people on here must have been fishing with their eyes closed.

lutra · Jun 7, 2018

steve2 said:
Cormorant numbers across Europe have greatly increased since the 1960’s. In the case of one species numbers in the 1960’s were estimated at 4000 pairs at the last count that stood at around 200,000. With large numbers of these now moving inland for easy pickings from manmade fisheries and inland waterways.
If you want to find out more about their numbers read

EU Cormorant Platform - Nature - Environment - European Commission

Without reading up, I would suspect numbers being down to 4000 pairs in the whole of Europe in the 60's may well be the reason it was made a protected species. Just because numbers are back up doesn't mean we have a plague and need to kill them all.

I'm sorry if you live in Yorkshire (really sorry for ya) or near a river that has many known problems, but its not the national picture for roach.
Given a good recovery on many English rivers and the spread across most of the British Isles that we have today, I should think we have more roach here than at any time in the past. Maybe it's time to thin them out a bit?

steve2 · Jun 7, 2018

lutra,

Just the sort of answer I have now come to expect from anglers in general. Whether it is cormorants, otters, and pollution, over abstraction. It doesn’t affect my fishing so why should I be bothered about what happens elsewhere. That is of course until it happens to them.

Mark Wintle · Jun 7, 2018

The type of cormorant whose numbers were low in the 70s was the pigmy cormorant but somehow the conservation bodies managed, without any justification, to get the other types protected as well.

Neil Maidment · Jun 7, 2018

There's a fair amount of coverage on Facebook and elsewhere of John Bailey's presentation at The Barbel Society's recent get together. He was very specific he was describing the "annihilation" of his "beloved" River Wensum by cormorants in the space of just a few years. It has prompted the now predictable range of responses including trying to apply his words to just about every river in the land. But one response in particular makes for interesting and disturbing reading.

Trevor Harrop of The Avon Roach Project has been campaigning against cormorant predation for many years. His very detailed response is too long to post on here but, in the context of this thread whilst not going back to the 1960's, the well researched and documented facts are worth repeating:

[SUB]"The main over-wintering population of cormorants doing the damage in this country are the European sub-species carbo sinensis, so not even British, which increased from 2000 in 1980’s to more than 23,000 in 2005 with a UK breeding population increasing from 1 to 2096 pairs in the same period."

"A basic initial stumbling block we face is the impact on the protected status of the birds by the currently licenced percentage allowed to be shot here in the UK. Firstly they shouldn’t be on the protected list, they are not British so are technically a non-native species........... there are estimated to be more than 1.2 million cormorants in Europe, upon which our licencing levels perhaps should be based........"

[/SUB][SUB]"Through working very hard with the Angling Trust and particularly the Fishery Management Advisors over the last two years, we have managed to breach the annual ceiling of 3000 birds, proving a greater demand than allocation of licences under the current regime...."
[/SUB]

tigger · Jun 7, 2018

Mark Twain famously said "lies , damned lies and statistics" !

Funny how all these angling conservationists never harp on about invasive fish species or even mention the untold damage they must be doing to our natural fish species.
Anglers have gott'a be the worst conservationists ever!
Imo a massive proportion of anglers are selfish halfwits who don't have the slightest bit of knowage about nature.....they will cause the demise of angling.

rob48 · Jun 7, 2018

tigger said:
Mark Twain famously said "lies , damned lies and statistics" !

Funny how all these angling conservationists never harp on about invasive fish species or even mention the untold damage they must be doing to our natural fish species.
Anglers have gott'a be the worst conservationists ever!
Imo a massive proportion of anglers are selfish halfwits who don't have the slightest bit of knowage about nature.....they will cause the demise of angling.

He famously said it when the statistcs were contrary to the argument he was promoting.
I'm amazed anyone who fished the Trent from the 70s isn't aware of the Cormorant impact from the late 80s onwards, especially as the improved water clarity enhanced their predation activity as they migrated upsteam from the coastal region and spread out to decimate the gravel pits and reservoirs in the Trent flood-plain.

Cormorants in the 1960s

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