(BV / 25-11-09) Sportive fishermen from Asturias (Spain) are against cormorant populations that stay during the winter in rivers in Asturias. After repeated complaints to the administration because seasonal populations of cormorants in rivers adversely affected the sportive fishing, the Administration has decided to kill shooting this elegant aquatic bird, a protected species in other environments.

The Ministry of Environment, Planning and Infrastructure, will strengthen this week the actions aimed at protecting salmon populations in rivers in Asturias. In this sense this Thursday it will start controls (hunting and trapping) of the population of cormorants in the rivers Sella and Narcea.

It is expected that the actions of “sacrifice” will be carried out in the near future, as it is now the time of arrival of these birds, and it will take place on seven rivers in Asturias: Cares, Sella, Nalón, Caudal, Narcea, Navia and Esva.

The Ministry has decided to conduct a campaign to control this bird, once it has observed an increase in recent years of wintering populations of cormorants in inland waters. With the provided controls it is intended to reduce the incidence of great cormorants wintering in the interior of Asturias on inland fish.

The checks will be made by technicians of the General Department for Biodiversity or Landscape. They will be carried out with firearms and legal ammunition and the specimens caught will be frozen for study.

Following politics for the management of trout populations in Asturias, measures to control great cormorant populations have to be done in medium high areas, in those stretches of river where their food base are salmonids or eel, and doing it from autumn months, as a deterrent and as a way to decrease temporarily in the autumn-winter, the feeding rate on populations. It will be especially in areas of roosts and innkeepers.

The Ministry of Environment, Planning and Infrastructure has based this decision (with which great environmentalist groups disagree) on technical reports commissioned to companies that are related to sportive fishing groups.