MORNING SENTINEL • October 27, 2022
Settlers in New England, believing their survival was at stake, set about early on to get rid of double-crested cormorants, and by the early 1800s the birds had been extirpated from the northeast region. But they have a huge worldwide range, and by the 1920s, they were documented to be nesting again in Maine. The fishing industry saw them as such a threat that in the 1940s and ’50s, vegetable oil was systematically sprayed on some 188,000 eggs to suppress the population. It didn’t really work. By the mid-1960s a number of harvestable fish species were noticeably declining in the Gulf of Maine and environs, and the birds took a lot of the blame. “Black water rats,” as one sardonic coastal moniker has it, were shot by the hundreds. ~ Dana Wilde