AR-News: Just ducky

[jim robertson]

Just ducky


Assertive action needed against species that chow down on salmon
They aren’t called fish ducks for nothing. A University of Washington 
researcher recently discovered that mergansers – spurned by duck hunters for 
their fishy flavor – are a major factor in the destruction of migrating 
salmon.

This probably isn’t a huge surprise to experienced fishermen. And it 
certainly wouldn’t be news to fishermen of the old days, who spent years of 
nights and days out on the river’s surface, gaining a deep understanding of 
what we nowadays call the ecosystem.

An editorial cartoon printed almost exactly a century ago in our sister 
newspaper, the Chinook Observer, portrays a host of predators eagerly 
waiting to snap up young salmon at the mouth of the Chinook River, home of 
Washington’s first salmon hatchery. Fish ducks are prominently displayed. 
Interestingly, seals and sea lions are nowhere to be seen.

Although many Columbia estuary fishermen consider marine mammals to be 
public enemy No. 1 when it comes to salmon predation – based on grown salmon 
yanked off lines and out of nets – the real damage happens at the other end 
of the salmon’s lifecycle as birds take advantage of the ocean-bound 
migration.

The UW researcher found mergansers account for nearly two-thirds of salmon 
consumption by birds, and gulls 25 percent. Most of this eating orgy happens 
in the slack water behind dams.

This study didn’t look at the estuary, where Caspian terns are blamed for 
much salmon consumption, but its results suggest a continuing need for 
research here to find exactly what’s eating fish and how to discourage them.

Mergansers are here in force, and though federally protected, are in no 
sense endangered. A program of hazing might profitably nudge fish ducks out 
of the way during crucial salmon migrations on the Lower Columbia.


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“The Stone Age did not end for lack of stone, and the Oil Age will end long 
before the world runs out of oil.” - Sheikh Zaki Yamani, former Saudi 
Arabian oil minister