All I can say is to all anglers.
Stop blaming wildlife for your own over fishing of the UK rivers
As an angler myself of 25 years experience, I know it is throw away comments like this which get the anglers backs up as much as the cormorants do.....or don’t in many circumstances.
The vast majority of anglers (at least 95%) who fish rivers are coarse fishing, and the catch is released once it is unhooked. Of course there are those anglers who are down right ignorant and wreck less who leave litter and fishing line and hooks about. This is the reason that many stretches of river are ‘run’ by fishing clubs, to expel the bad eggs amongst the anglers, but it is not that easy as many stretches of rivers, miles of canals, acres of lakes and ponds offer free fishing to all and free fishing is sometimes an open invitation to idiots. I do agree with you about the ‘private fisheries’ as you word it. A far more accurate description would have been ‘instant fisheries’, but I know what you are getting at, a hole in the ground filled with water and fish over night almost, however your choice of wording was very wrong, (no offense meant).
‘Private fisheries’ are often exclusive clubs run in a professional manor where each member is vetted and anyone found leaving ANY litter of any kind, causing any damage to the flora or fauna is immediately expelled.
I have heard many many anglers talk rubbish about the volume of fish that a cormorant can eat in a day, ‘ten times or even fifteen times’ its own body weight etc,, - I have heard it all for years and years off some anglers zzzzz.
It is true that stocks of some of the natural lakes, the rivers and the canals are being affected by cormorants though and these fish should not be wiped out by the cormorants, not from an angling perspective, but from an ecological perspective, the fish are a part of the ecosystem food chain, removal of these endemic species by an recently introduced ( the cormorant) species is potentially hazardous on the ecosystem, and in some circumstances I am in agreement of the culling of cormorants on lakes and rivers in the UK from what I know myself. I stress on culling and not total removal of here.
Until the last couple of decades (in the UK) eels made up the majority of the Cormorants diet, since the dramatic drop in elvers returning to the UK from the Sargasso Cormorants have moved inland more so to feed. It is not necessarily the fault of over fishing by us that has led to cormorants moving inland, it could be any of the following factors, but more likely a combination of them and possibly more besides.
a) Depletion of food in coastal areas (many reasons for this)
b) Birds moving inland have become far more successful thanthose staying coastal, therefore breed and raise young at higher rates.
c) Removal of a specific species that cormorant where reliant on as a food source. (eels are an example of this)
On the other side of the fence (the Adrian & Stefka side perhaps) these people should not be so quick to think that all anglers are to be tarred with the same brush, ie thinking all anglers want all cormorants killed, this is simply not the case.
As for the comments about ‘non native invasive cormorants invasion’, well if the coast is 50 miles from a lake that has seen an increase in cormorants over the last 20 years, it is silly to say they are non-native, birds fly, so that is a silly comment.
If however they (those calling for cormorant expulsion) want to talk about an invasive non native species then look no further than the red signal crayfish and what that is currently doing to our inland fisheries, crayfish don’t fly, they where introduced and they breed like wildfire and are causing big problems for UK coarse fish (their eggs), native UK crayfish and insect larvae) never mind the cormorants.
My angling preference these days (last 10 years or so) is carp angling, fishing large lakes with a low stock of stock. As far as my fishing goes I go by this rule when out in the countryside fishing - “Take only photos. Leave only foot prints”
