Pond Boss Forums INTRO Questions & Observations Cormorants

Yesterday I visited my pond and counted 21 cormorants on it. There numbers have been slowly building up from a dozen two weeks ago. This is all on a pond that is slightly less than two acres now. I know I'm not allowed to shoot these guys but is it legal to put in scare controls to harass them? I've seen some laser systems and also some sound devices. Not sure if the neighbors will be too happy about the sound devices but I'm not sure if I will have any bluegill left by the end of this winter.

Speaking of the blue gill, I put in 1000 this year and have been feeding them, bass are supposed to go in next spring. Should I stock more bluegill at the time I stock the bass now?

SSS them

I was coming up from Emory yesterday and Lake Fork was painted black with all the cormorants.

CS, let us know if a laser works. I added pontoons on my drone just in case it accidentally scares birds.

I heard that one can eat a pound of fish per day. 1,000 bluegill that are 4.5"-5.5" in length weigh between 60-90 pounds. 20 birds in 5 days can eat 100# of fish.........
If you are on the property daily, and had a drone, I sure would be flying the drone over the pond daily to check the vegetation growth.........

Shoot

I'm trying to go out there as much as possible. I think one issue is that all my submerged trees are providing perch points for the cormorants making it an ideal place for them to come and hang out. The lake is around 5' low right now because we haven't had any sizeable rain since the summer when it filled up. I don't really want to cut down all the trees but I'm not sure what else to do. I stopped counting at 39 birds when I went out yesterday, my guess is that there were easily 4 dozen. Really sucks to see years of hard work and an absolute ton of money being wiped out.

FYI, the laser system is $13,000. So that won't be happening regardless at this point.

What I did.
Put TPosts along the sides about 20 ft apart. Then strung cord from post to post. Haven’t had a problem since .

So once the cormorants got to their peak of around 50 or so birds, they only stayed another few days and then their numbers completely fell off. With in another week they were all gone and haven't been back since. My assumptions are that they ate out the lake to the point that the remaining fish concentration wasn't dense enough to continue hunting there. I had put in a lot of mature bluegill the size of my hand, so I know these guys were hopefully spawning like crazy through the summer. My question right now is should I stock more bluegill this spring when I put in my bass? I can't imagine that these birds would have chased fish less than 2" in size, just seems like it wouldn't be worth the calories, so my fathead minnow population and the later bluegill fry I would assume would have survived the slaughter. Hopefully these would number in the thousands. My concern would be that I may be missing a lot of mature spawning size bluegill. Any thoughts on this would help.

Thanks,

David

I had the same problem the last 2 winters. Tried a powerful handheld green laser and it had zero effect, worked to scare geese, ducks and egrets but no effect on the cormorants. I found over a dozen dead and dying BG after a cormorant feeding frenzy, too big to swallow or just so much food they didn’t eat every fish they grabbed. The good news is the following days I didn’t see the normal Bg feeding at feeders and thought they were dead but in fact they just quit feeding and hid in structure. Once the cormorants disappeared the BG came back and fed well with no noticeable decrease in numbers.

That's good news, hopefully the same happened for me. I decided that I probably need to go out there with some light tackle to see if I can catch any bluegill just to see if there are any large ones left.

Scare them. They are afraid of high brass #4.

They seem to be scared of .22 mag also. This winter we haven’t had many visits from cormorants……

Pat, ours have been light too.

That’s a good thing

An eagle just landed in corner of pond! That’s rare here

When I see cormorants at my pond they seldom fly straight outta the area, they seem to always make on huge circle back over the area on their way out, not sure why, like they are trying to gain elevation slowly.

My pond is pretty much surrounded by trees except for the dam area, the trees behind the dam are low enough that they could take off straight over it but for some reason they always circle back once or twice.

I have always wondered if that was a taunting thing or a courtesy thing, for when it takes you a few minutes to bring out the old turkey load, but it has proven to be a costly maneuver for a good many of them.

That is exactly correct....they almost always circle back.

They do that to gain altitude probably wet feathers…. I know they have very keen sight, can’t hardly sneak up on them