Wildlife

30,000 cormorants destroying lakeside park

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(ON) The Toronto Star- One arm of the Leslie Street Spit, home to Tommy Thompson Park and the Great Lakes’ largest colony of cormorants, looks like a wintry apocalypse. There are no trees now, just a few guano-spattered snags. This is where cormorants first settled in the park in 1990. They now number about 30,000. In some Ontario parks, Parks Canada officials shoot cormorants to stem the loss of trees.

Echo

Researchers find promising prospects to battle beech bark disease

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By Jack Johnston

LANSING — In the dead cold of the Upper Peninsula winter, Robert Heyd leaves his snowmobile and approaches an enormous American beech armed with a slingshot, rope and a saw. Supported by his snowshoes on four feet of snow, Heyd slings a quarter-pound weight attached to parachute cord 80 feet up into the highest branches of the behemoth and uses the rope to haul the 4-foot saw to the top. A branch falls harmlessly to the ground next to the Department of Natural Resources (DNR) forest health management program director. It’s a first step in saving the state’s majestic beeches. After eight years of research, the DNR and the U.S. Forest Service are ready to implement a strategy to fight the destructive beech bark disease, said Jennifer Koch, a research biologist with the Forest Service’s Northern Research Station in Delaware, Ohio.