A bird that was nearly wiped out of Europe half a century ago has become the continent's most divisive angler's enemy. The great cormorant, a glossy black fish-eater once reduced to a few thousand breeding pairs, has rebounded to around two million birds — and fishermen from the Baltic to the Danube now want governments to thin the flocks.
Nine EU members — Croatia, the Czech Republic, Estonia, Finland, Latvia, Poland, Romania, Slovakia and Sweden — have pushed to relax the protections the bird has held since 1979, arguing that its appetite is gutting inland fisheries and fish farms.
For the anglers and commercial operators who share the water with them, the frustration is raw. Peter Bozik of the Slovak Fishing Club described a situation that "is very bad and keeps worsening," and went so far as to brand the cormorant "a terrorist." Pavel Vrana, an ichthyologist with the Czech Fishing Union, reached for an even starker image: "When you have 3,000 cormorants descending on a place, it's a chainsaw massacre."
In Romania's Danube Delta — one of Europe's great fishing grounds — the mood is the same. "It's a harmful animal," said Grigore Stefan of the Murighiol Fishermen's Association. "I don't know if there are any fish left in the delta this summer."
Ornithologists point out that the cormorant did not create the hole it is now filling. Overfishing and the loss of large predatory fish stripped many waters of their natural balance, leaving the birds an open buffet. "The cormorants have simply replaced these predators," said Zdenek Vermouzek of the Czech Society for Ornithology.
Bird groups also doubt that a mass cull could even succeed against a mobile, intelligent species spread across a continent. "A blanket solution will fail," said Jozef Ridzon of SOS/BirdLife Slovakia, who argues that habitat restoration and localised, selective deterrence would do more than an open season across Europe.
The dispute has reached EU regulators. Countries backing a cull want the great cormorant reclassified as a huntable species under the bloc's Birds Directive — the very 1979 law that rescued it — a move that would let national governments declare a hunting season. Bird groups are fighting to keep the protection in place.
For anglers, the argument is about more than one bird. On heavily pressured rivers and lakes, a descending flock can hammer the trout, grayling and coarse fish that clubs spend years and money rebuilding. Against that stands one of Europe's clearest conservation wins — the cormorant's own comeback — and the fear among bird groups that unpicking its protection sets a precedent for undoing others.