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Salmon: Don't Remove Dams, Kill Birds by Don Wyman Kitsap Sun, November 30, 2007

In response to Rev. Jennifer Pratt's recent opinion letter regarding removing Snake River dams to save salmon and thus killer whales:

Ironically, The Army Corps of Engineers, overseeing recovery efforts for the Columbia/Snake River salmon continues to deposit dredge material 20 miles upriver from the ocean resulting in the creation of Rice Island. Rice Island's salmon/steelhead-gulping terns have grown by 800 percent since 1999.

More of a recent problem, is the double-crested cormorant, that have grown from 100 birds in 1989 to over 25,000 in 2005 and growing. Combined, terns and double-breasted cormorants eat upwards of 25 percent of all the salmon smolt in the Columbia River system as reported by government fishery agencies.

What is being done about these two salmon-eating birds? Very little, terns are being "relocated" and the more ravenous and accelerating population growing double-breasted cormorants are being pretty much ignored.

You don't need to remove dams, you need to control bird predation. That means the corps needs to stop dumping dredge material that the provides the nesting grounds for most of these birds and to kill - yes, kill - many of the others.

To tear down dams kills humans' livelihoods, but that doesn't seem to count when compared with killing animals within the bleeding-heart liberal crowd.

Related Pages:
Clean Energy vs. Whales: How to Choose? by Brad Knickerbocker, Christian Science Monitor, 11/28/7
Eternal Dam Nation by Daniel Jack Chasan, Crosscut, 11/26/7