Environmental groups and state agencies monitoring Lake Champlain are hoping to cut back on a population of Cormorants. The birds’ population has boomed since the pesticide DDT, which had decimated cormorants and other birds, was banned.
Since then thousands of cormorants descended on Lake Champlain’s Young Island, and within a few years they had killed all its trees, turning it to an eerie landscape of nettles, thistle and bird droppings.
Cormorants are blamed by anglers for eating too many fish, and by wildlife biologists for squeezing out many other bird species.
Now scientists are trying to reduce their population by coating their eggs in spring with vegetable oil, which prevents them from hatching.