Half a century ago, the great cormorant had all but vanished from Europe. Today the glossy black fish-eater numbers around two million, and it has become the most argued-over bird in European angling — with fishermen from the Baltic lakes to the Danube Delta demanding that governments cut the flocks down.
Nine EU countries — Croatia, the Czech Republic, Estonia, Finland, Latvia, Poland, Romania, Slovakia and Sweden — are pressing to weaken protections the cormorant has enjoyed since 1979, saying the bird is emptying rivers, lakes and fish farms.
Anglers who work those waters are not mincing words. Peter Bozik of the Slovak Fishing Club said the situation "is very bad and keeps worsening," and called the cormorant "a terrorist." Pavel Vrana, an ichthyologist with the Czech Fishing Union, put it more vividly still: "When you have 3,000 cormorants descending on a place, it's a chainsaw massacre."
The same anger runs through Romania's Danube Delta, prized as one of the continent's richest fisheries. "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."
They argue the bird has merely moved into a gap people created. Decades of overfishing and the disappearance of big predatory fish left many waters unbalanced and easy pickings. "The cormorants have simply replaced these predators," said Zdenek Vermouzek of the Czech Society for Ornithology.
There is also doubt a cull could work against a clever, far-ranging species. "A blanket solution will fail," said Jozef Ridzon of SOS/BirdLife Slovakia, who favours restoring habitat and using targeted, local deterrence over a continent-wide shooting season.
The row 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 — which would let national governments open a hunting season. Bird groups are fighting to keep the protection in place.
For anglers, the stakes run deeper than one bird. On hard-fished rivers and lakes, a settling flock can strip out the trout, grayling and coarse fish that clubs spend years and considerable money restoring. Against that stands one of Europe's clearest conservation successes — the cormorant's own recovery — and the fear that undoing it opens the door to unpicking other protections.