The Ohio Division of Wildlife (apparently the agency most devoted to the project, on-paper alliances with USF&WS and USDA aside) began shooting double-crested cormorants off their nests in Ohio in May 2006. The DOW's first--as far as I know--publication on this effort is now on line, beginning on page 40 of a document posted at http://www.dnr.state.oh.us/Portals/9/pdf/2008WildlifeReport.pdf . Other less controversial projects are treated in this publication as well, and are worth reading. This report covers the lethal control of cormorants in 2006 and 2007, and does not include 579 killed at West Sister Island, or as-yet unpublicized numbers killed at Green and Turning Point Islands, in May of this year. It is easy to see in Figure 2 that shooting has not resulted in more egret & heron nests at WSI, and the reported results elsewhere seem equivocal at best. Figure 2 clearly shows that since the largest incursion of cormorants on WSI in 1995 there has been *no* significant change in nesting numbers of any other colonial nester there--despite the alleged depredations of the cormorants 1995-2005, or even after recent controls by lethal means 2006-2007. The report makes several unwarranted statements: that cormorants never nested in the Great Lakes prior to the early 1900s, and that they first received statutory protection in the 1970s. It also ignores documented nestings in Franklin and Summit counties. But read it for yourself, if you care that our Ohio wildlife employees seem determined to kill large numbers of native birds every spring into the indefinite future to achieve what they regard as a desirable balance of species. Bill Whan Columbus ______________________________________________________________________ Ohio-birds mailing list, a service of the Ohio Ornithological Society. Our thanks to Miami University for hosting this mailing list. Additional discussions can be found in our forums, at www.ohiobirds.org/forum/. You can join or leave the list, or change your options, at: http://listserv.muohio.edu/scripts/wa.exe?LIST=OHIO-BIRDS Send questions or comments about the list to: [log in to unmask]