PORTLAND, Maine - Bald eagles, bouncing back after years of decline, are swaggering forth with an appetite for great cormorant chicks that threatens to wipe out that bird population in the United States.
"They're like thugs. They're like gang members. They go to these offshore islands where all these seabirds are and the birds are easy picking... These young eagles are harassing the bejesus out of all the birds, and the great cormorants have been taking it on the chin."
...In Alaska, many eagles have shifted their diet from fish to seabirds. In the Midwest, they've been known to eat baby blue herons. And besides Maine's great cormorants, eagles are also feasting on baby double-breasted cormorants, gulls, eider ducks and even loons...
Nobody's raising a stink about the eagles' taste for double-breasted cormorants and gulls because those birds are so numerous and considered nuisances by many.
By 1963, there were only 417 pairs of eagles left in the lower 48 states. There are now more than 10,000 pairs... Minnesota, Wisconsin and Florida each have more than 1,000 pairs of bald eagles...
We see them every time we go up to Leech Lake. Wish they would take out some of the double-breasted cormorants that are eating the walleye up there.
