Not a Sea Bird.

There's an argument doing the rounds that we emptied the sea, so we've only ourselves to blame for the cormorants on our rivers.

It runs like this. We overfished the North Sea and let the sandeels go. The birds had nowhere left to feed, so they came inland to us. We invited them in. We've no business complaining, and certainly no business reaching for a gun. We made this bed.

It's made in good faith, usually by people who think of themselves as being on the side of nature. It's also wrong twice over. Wrong on why the birds are here, and wrong about what follows even if it were right.

We should say where we stand. We build the tools anglers and fisheries use to record what these birds actually do, and we hold a large and growing dataset on cormorant behaviour on UK fresh water. The cormorant work is free to use and always has been. It runs at a loss and we run it anyway, because somebody has to hold the numbers this argument keeps being made without.

They didn't come from our sea

The bird on your club water is largely not the sea-cliff cormorant Britain had through most of the twentieth century. It's the continental race, sinensis, a freshwater bird that breeds in trees across Europe. It first nested here at Abberton reservoir in Essex in 1981 and has been spreading ever since. We've set out that case in full, with the sources, in Are You Really On The Right Side Here? and in our Cormorant Subspecies Identification Guide.

What matters here is what it does to the emptied-sea story. These birds didn't leave a British coast because we stripped it. Their rise tracks something far more specific: legal protection from 1979 onwards, a continental population recovering hard from centuries of persecution, and a freshwater larder of new reservoirs and flooded gravel pits that gave an expanding bird somewhere to go.

A displaced marine bird and an expanding continental freshwater bird are different animals with different explanations. The emptied-sea argument is about the first. The bird at your fishery is mostly the second.

The premise is wrong before the conclusion gets a hearing.

Grant it anyway

Take the argument at its strongest, because parts of it are true and they deserve saying. The sea is in a bad way and we did that. Our commercial stillwaters are stocked to the gills, easy pickings for anything that can dive, and we built those too. Cormorants are opportunists. They go where the food is easy and we laid on the buffet. A thoughtful person can look at all of it and conclude the conflict is a mess of our own making.

So grant every man-made part of it. Say the sea is our fault, the stocked stillwater is our fault, the easy feeding is our fault. Even then, the conclusion doesn't follow.

None of it is the fish's fault. The roach in your margins did not overfish the North Sea. The dace shoal did not warm the Channel. When we decide that freshwater fish, and the rivers and lakes and the people who look after them, should quietly absorb the consequence of what we did to the sea, we are not protecting the environment. We are doing penance. We've found a part of nature we don't feel guilty about and decided it can pay for the part we do.

Penance protects nothing. It moves the damage somewhere quieter. A healthy fishery hollowed out to settle a debt owed by a broken sea is not a conservation win. It's one loss laid on top of another and called humility.

A question about numbers

None of this is an argument for reaching straight for the gun, and it isn't an argument against it either. It's an argument for making the decision on evidence rather than on whichever story flatters us most. Whether a bird is doing enough damage to warrant control, on a given water, in a given season, is a question about numbers. Numbers are the one thing this argument keeps reaching for and rarely has to hand.

That's the part we can fix. A club with two seasons of structured records on what the cormorants are actually doing has a different conversation with Natural England than a club with a hunch and a scarer receipt. That conversation starts the day someone writes it down.

Guilt is easy to feel from a distance. It costs nothing, and it lets a bad argument stand because arguing with it feels like arguing with conscience. Recording what happens on your own water costs an evening a week, and it changes what gets decided.

Guilt is cheap. Stewardship costs.

The Hydroscape Team