As an RSPB member and angler, where do I start? Let's start with Bob's nonsense about 'two species of cormorant.' Crap. There's one, Phalacrocorax carbo, and it has subspecies, not separate species.
Secondly, there have been cormorants nesting inland since the Middle Ages - it's not some recent phenomenon. In research done in the late '50s, a scientist recorded Scottish loch cormorants which had been recorded breeding there in 1663, and bones recovered from the Fens prove they bred there too when it was marsh. Yes, there are more living inland than ever, but they DO migrate - dispersal, it's called - and go where the fishing's best. I know from bassing on the south coast that sandeels, mackerel and many other shoal fish are now hard to come by because they've been so overfished. And where do they go? No, not fertiliser, they go into animal feed, and a lot of them into trout and salmon pellets - fish food. So stocked trout and other fish farming contributes to the decline of 'industrial' fish (and consequently to bass and fish which feed on them) and may contribute to the dispersal of comorants inland.
Bob's assertion that 'We are active in creating and maintaining habitat, they are in the main passive. We have breeding programmes. What to they have?' begs the reply: spend several million of habitat conservation and buy up whole tracts of vanishing countryside on which much native wildlife depends.
Apart from the valuable battles fought by the ACA, angling invests next to sod all in preserving what's good. We buy up ancient lakes full of rudd and tench and stuff them with carp or catfish. And while I think the honourable people who visit this website DO care about rivers, the reaction from the rest when the going got tough was to fill the gaps around Bill Makin's goldfish bowls and pretend it was real life.
Angling, as a sport, makes one valuable contribution to the countryside; it is a good way of monitoring fish stocks. There aren't too many fishwatchers who aren't also fishers. But ask any club trying to organise a bank-clearing day how much practical help they get from 90 % of membership. None.
There are examples of lakes where the RSPB and angling are quite happy together. But ever since AT's cormorant poisoning story which landed its editor in court, they've kept a wary eye on us. They are well-organised, well funded and well-researched, so before we go shooting our mouths off at birding we should, as a sport, try to be even half as powerful and well-respected as they are, overturning the almost terminal chaos that is the angling fraternity. We, collectively, couldn't organise a mud-slinging contest in a slurry pit which is why angling, as a sport, is dying on its arse, with no effective national scheme to bring youngsters into the sport and no self-funded research into matters of enormous importance to anglers.