Dave Bailey

Oooooh boy, this could lose me a few friends. Here is an article I wrote a few years ago, but never got around to submitting to anyone. If you decide to read it please do so from beginning to end before dashing off a critical diatribe, and take the time to digest it. =========== Cormorants are ugly! (but leave them alone) Perched above a scrawny neck, on a head which waggles to and fro like a frenetic robot, are a pair of beady eyes which hardly seem adequate to peer past the inelegant hooked bill. The black feathers adorning the body are not particularly sleek or glossy, rather, they perpetually look as if the owner has just emerged from a sooty chimney. In flight they present a crooked profile, and when in the water they ride low, as if they are constantly on the verge of sinking. They waddle on land like an inebriated goose, and their unholy cackle is unmusical and grating. Their vast colonies are bleak guano covered rock piles denuded of vegetation, with stick nests adorning bare dead tree branches reaching in vain for sunlight from which they can no longer gain energy. As you can probably guess I am not enamored of the double crested cormorant, not the least reason of which is that it seems to be having a negative effect on one of my favourite birds, the black crowned night heron. The heron is much prettier, but appears to have a preference for the same sort of nesting areas that are now being usurped by exploding cormorant populations. And it is that population growth which is being viewed with alarm by many in Ontario, an understandable reaction but one that may be misplaced in its proposals about how to handle the situation. A few decades ago cormorants began expanding both in numbers and range at a staggering rate, and can now be seen in almost every body of water in southern and central Ontario, including urban ponds of only a few acres extent. Sportsmen are worried that they may have a debilitating effect on fish populations, and have been clamoring to have controls in place before fish stocks decline. Is this level of concern warranted? Possibly, but in the rush to judgment let’s not simply think that lowering cormorant numbers will bring us back to the halcyon days when fish abounded in our lakes and rivers. Because they still are. There are two misconceptions that I have heard directed at the cormorants, both of them so easily dismissed that if any of you are using them I advise you to stop before some kid fresh out of a grade 6 environmental studies class tears you to shreds. The first is the claim that cormorants are an introduced species. Balderdash! Nobody ever went out to a cormorant colony, fired a net over it, bundled some into a truck, and released them in Ontario. They have always been here, albeit in smaller numbers a few decades ago, and at one time that may have been much more numerous than they are today. The second accusation is that they will eat everything. No, they will not. As a predatory species with a rather catholic diet they may eat almost anything, but that is not the same as everything. Any predator exists in balance with its food resources, and once cormorant populations reach a certain level they will be kept naturally in check by the availability of prey, and there are indications that in some areas of the province they may have already reached that point, and may be declining slightly. Simply put, they cannot eat everything. So what is the reason for the growth in numbers? Whatever it may be it isn’t the bird’s fault, cormorants just doin’ what cormorants gotta do, or for that matter what any animal has to do - eat, breed, and survive. There has obviously been some radical change in circumstance which is allowing them to do it better than before, and that is what we need to address. Have they benefited from the clearer waters brought about by the influence of a true introduced species, the zebra mussel? Cormorants are sight feeders which need to see their quarry, and anyone who grew up during the fifties and sixties will remember that trying to find your nose in front of your face underwater was well nigh impossible in those days when phosphate pollution had algae blooming so thick that you could almost walk from Toronto to Rochester without getting your ankles wet. Okay, an exaggeration maybe, but the water in the lower Great Lakes back then could charitably be described as ‘opaque’. Presuming that a hunting cormorant could even swim through the thick fibrous mats of algae, they would be hard-pressed to see the fish they were after. What have we got to complain about? Sport fishers have it better today than at any time in history. Fibreglass or carbon fibre rods are lightweight, exceptionally strong, and sensitive to the slightest nibble. Modern high-tech reels are on a par with anything NASA could produce for a mission to Mars, smooth in action and reliable, and they are spooled with monofilament or braided line that is light-years ahead of whatever primitive twine Izaak Walton used. Fish finders and hand-held gps units enable us to locate the best areas in a lake with hardly a glance at a map, and there are many resources available in print or on the web to help us before the season even starts. Step into a high powered boat that has a shallow draft, a live well, and a quiet 4-stroke engine, and get yourself to your honey-hole. Reach into your tackle box for the latest plastic grub, scented to attract fish better than live bait. Stocking programs by governments and sports clubs have ensured that desirable species are kept at sustainable levels. Halcyon days indeed, but we seem to be worried that cormorants are taking our fish. Well, they are not our fish any more than the cormorant’s fish (not even the stocked ones really, we went and poured them into a lake), and in fact they are a lot more important for a cormorant, which doesn’t have the luxury of a local supermarket. And if, as is often claimed, anglers are mostly practicing ‘catch and release’, then we’re obviously not doing this for the filéts. Which is worse? By picking on cormorants we may be playing into the hands of something more insidious and more of a threat – P E T A and its ilk. If we press for cormorant controls based on our own desire to remove them as competitors then they can more easily sway the public with the idea that we are heartless killers caring nothing for the other denizens of the wild, and we would need to expend resources fighting back. Why not save our energies by not giving them a battle that will have to be fought? Cormorants don’t care if we catch a fish or not, and they will never actively try to prevent us from fishing. They don’t care what we eat, and they will never try to force us to avoid food which our bodies have evolved to eat and turn us into vegetarians. Cormorants will never parade with placards at bass tournaments, handing out brochures slandering us and our lifestyle. Cormorants are blindly going about their business as part of the natural order, P E T A et al are willfully promoting an unnatural, unscientific, and indefensible agenda designed to further their rather twisted view of how we should behave. ==============

There is one part of flag protocol that many aren't aware of if they are asked to place a flag at half-staff; a flag is never raised to half-staff, it should be raised all the way, left there for a moment, and then lowered halfway.

HEAR HEAR! Just what I was going to say. Rods after that are merely variations on a theme.

There's a very good explanation as to why they act that way - they're STUPID!

You guys are fast, you beat me to my own post! Maybe we should pin this one?

I'll second that. I travel to Windsor frequently and I always stop at the Pilot on the west side of Tilbury. Cheapest gas on the route.

I love Olympus cameras, and I have used their 24 megapixel jobs for over 30 years... an OM-1 with Fujichrome!

I've been trying to get a shot like that for years. Beautiful.

Stunted mine too, I won't say where...

If this thought doesn't make people quit I don't know what will: Q - What's the worst thing about getting a lung transplant? A - Every time you cough you get a mouthful of somebody else's phlegm. Stay strong.

Widow spiders occur in Ontario as far north as Georgian Bay, but for the most part they aren't marked the same as the one everybody thinks about. Do a Google image search for "Latrodectus variolus" for pictures, they differ from the better known L. mactans. As far as I know varioulus is just as venomous as mactans.

Ozzy Osbourne's Genome Reveals Neandertal Lineage

In 2005 I was sitting at home while the rest of the family was up at Killarney PP, I was going to join them later. The first reports of Hurricane Katrina were coming in and it didn't look good. The next day I drove up there and when I got to the campsite one of the first things I heard was a woman calling loudly to her daughter - "Katrina, KAATRIIINAAAAAA!" I was thinking that she was going to get a lot of ribbing when she got back home and they heard the news!

Another one is probably my earliest childhood memory, I was only a year and a half old. I distinctly remember watching my parents trying to get ankle-deep water off the floor in our basement apartment in Scarborough. October 17, 1954. Hurricane Hazel, which killed 81 people. Let's hope we never see another like it.

August 2006, Moosonee. We were camping at Tidewater P.P. and got one of the locals to take us a few miles up the river to do some fishing. Just started to hit into some nice walleye when all of a sudden the sky turned black. We got back into the 20ft James Bay freighter canoe and he gunned the engine to get us back to town before the crap hit - too late. The first thing I noticed was a funnel cloud forming above the canoe, fortunately it didn't touch down on us. Then the hail started, peas sized and painful. He decided to head for the shoreline of the nearest island, he hit those pebbles like it was a beach assault! While he was rigging a tarp at a small overhang to protect my wife and kids from the hail I was pounding the anchor into the beach and jumping on it to make sure it wouldn't come loose. We waited it out for about 15 minutes, and when it let up we got back into the canoe and high-tailed it back to town. We didn't bother going to the tent on the island, just headed for the hotel and got a couple of rooms. Later that night at a restaurant some of the locals told us it was the worst storm they could ever remember. Apparently some tornadoes did touch down in the muskeg to the west, we got off lucky. You don't think of Moosonee as tornado country, but now that's the only way I can think of it. That's our guide, Wayne Tomatuk, manning the helm. Notice that even though the sky is nasty the water isn't very rough, I still can't get my head around that weird situation. It seemed that almost all the action was coming straight down instead of sideways.

Jim Floyd will be 95 on October 20, and I'll be hoisting a glass to him. He was also involved heavily with the Avro C-102 Jetliner, another Canadian aircraft that got screwed over royally. It flew just 13 days after the de Havilland Comet (the world's first jet airliner), and it was a fine aircraft that could have had us leading the world in regional airliners. Here's a link to the whole sad story.

My mother's strawberry-rhubarb, no contest.

He was tagged with the epithet 'The Great Zura' after his displays in a CF-100 at Farnborough, everyone was impressed by his skill at doing things with a jet that hadn't been done before. One of my earliest childhood memories is being at a beach on Lake Simcoe in 1958, when suddenly there was an incredible bang and a roar above us. We all looked up to see the Arrow streaking northward. If you want to see a full scale replica drop in to the Canadian Air and Space Museum at Downsview Park.

Leafs win two in a row to start the season. In other news, reports are coming in from astrophysicists around the world that the universe may have suddenly tilted on its axis.

I've often thought that this would be interesting to investigate scientifically, but the logistics are daunting. Arranging a double-blind test would consume a lot of time and effort.

I'm pretty sure it was required long before then. And if I recall correctly it only applies to powered vessels, canoes and such are okay.

I'll second that. I don't really care if some jackass cuts himself in twain, but believe it or not the landowner could be held liable whether they were there legally or not. It has happened.

Frenchman's Bay is one. Go south on West Shore Boulevard, when you get to the very end turn left. Keep going until you're driving on sand and you'll see a launch area on your left.