The North Texas lake I fish has been wrapped up with these darn birds this spring. Clearly increased in number over prior years and seem to be staying around later into the spring than usual. Anyone noticed the same? The crappie have pretty much moved out of the creek areas I usually catch fish and a lot of the ones I have caught have battle scars.

I put them in the same category as fireants and feral hogs. Unfortunately they're protected.

They are protected, so make sure you don't do anything illegal. That said, if you can encourage them to move on some way, it would be a good thing for your fishery. I've seen over 100 them line up and travel in a wave down a creek channel. They were swimming and diving in what looked like a military formation, lined up from bank to bank. There was not a single minnow left in that creek after they passed through.

Absolutely have seen an increase on every lake I have been on in 2025.

I saw a first in January. Albino Cormorant on a pond on our golf course. They literally destroy the spawn here every year.

We get flocks of 30-50 pelicans that join with the cormorants each spring. They both are fish eating machines.

I swear these b!@#$%ds (and white pelicans) know the whereabouts of every power plant lake in Texas! I have no idea how it makes sense for cormorants to be a protected animal. They add nothing to the world. You can always tell where they roost, because everything is dead underneath them.

Spot on!

Another political cluster. Agencies originally picked studies that indicated cormorants did not affect game species. Over the decades additional studies have shown devastating impacts in specific situations and on specific species. The US Fish and Wildlife Service spent a bunch of money to do an Environmental Impact Statement on the issue and passed a final rule on cormorant control that went into effect in February 2021. Unfortunately, after all the politics, the final rule is basically useless except in isolated circumstances. I watched cormorants eat trout after trout on the Trinity River the day after the release. Sad.

Here is the link to the USFWS final rule if you are interested.

https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-50/chapter-I/subchapter-B/part-21/subpart-D/section-21.123

I've done the same on a local pond that gets stocked every year during trout stocking season.
I swear the cormorants start showing up a couple of days before the stocking truck arrives and it takes those roaches about 3 or 4 days to catch whatever they stocked. They swim in packs and dive down and even fight over the fish they catch.
I rarely see any actually being caught by fishermen after a few days, they are pretty much cleaned out.
Talk about a waste of time, money, man hours and gas, just to feed the birds.
I mentioned that to one of the guys unloading the trout and he just kind of shrugged and laughed.

I recall finding several drowned cormorants on deep trotlines on the north end of Lake Conroe during the record low water levels during the 2011 drought. They apparently dove down and caught fish that were hooked on the trotlines, got hooked themselves, and drowned. Although I believe that any animals, even pests, deserve a clean death, I can't deny that it did my heart good to see those neutralized cormorants hanging off those trotlines. I can't say that I'd like to see them totally eliminated, but they sure need their numbers reduced significantly. Verrrrry significantly........

I hear there is actually some discussion at PAW about this matter now..

I have complained and complained about these vermin for years, and we actually did a numbers and ID study with PAW and one of their Animal Biologists down here ten or twelve years ago.

And as far as bird identification goes, we did have a number of Double Crested here. But best as we could tell we had a lot of Neo-Tropic cormorants here as well, and they were probably in the majority.

The government has no idea what birds we have here, and no clue about the numbers..

Last research done in Texas was by A&M I think I recall, and I communicated by e-mail with the Professor Emeritus that oversaw the project, and he had no idea we even had cormorants here..

This was at least ten years ago.

A few months ago there was a bleeding heart article in an Austin publication about the poor cormorants habitat depletion.. Truth is that cormorants destroy their own habitat, and pollute the very waters they live on.

But that's what we're up against, a bunch of tree hugging idiots that have no idea about the damage being done.

They are nasty vile creatures. I have written about this on many occasions and have even had TV stations from the valley here doing stories about them.

But for all the wailing and gnashing of teeth, I have had zero luck in getting anything done about them

I have no doubt in my mind, that we at one time easily had twenty thousand (20,000) birds here. Numbers seem to be some lower here now.

It is said by the experts that a cormorant can eat a half pound or more of fish a day. I have done the math on this many times before..

Let's say you have ten thousand birds. Times.5 pounds a day. That's 5,000 pounds of forage a day. That's 35,000 pounds a week..
That's 1,820,000 pounds of fish a year..

Yes that is one million, eight hundred and twenty thousand pounds of fish per year..

I also don't want to see them go extinct, but common sense would have one think that thinning the herd a bit would be prudent.

I can't believe the government isn't protecting the rats in NYC..

Don't nudge em James. You know how they think in NYC!! Government!

We need to find out how to give bird flu to cormorants. IslandJim