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Originally appears in the Fall 2021 issue.

By Pete Salmansohn

Editor’s Note: In this latest installment in our running Finding Common Ground series, Pete Salmansohn discusses human-wildlife controversies, namely those involving Double-crested Cormorants, White-tailed Deer, and Canada Geese. I can personally relate, as I grew up in small-town southeastern Ontario, where all three species have been sources of contention for most of my life. Where, then, does the notion of finding common ground come into play? I’ve certainly witnessed numerous instances over the years where precious little common ground was found among stakeholders, at least initially. Turbulent stretches in negotiations are stressful, to be sure… and yet, they are essential parts of the process of finding a “line-of-best-fit” path forward — one developed after listening to the various considerations with empathy and an open mind and, indeed, finding some common ground. Human-wildlife controversies aren’t going anywhere, so why not ready young learners for the important discussions that will need to be had about our mutual existence with fellow life forms? The stories, examples, and tips to follow concern 5th– and 6th-grade students, and much can be adapted for younger and older students.

In the summer of 1998, nine men took several boat trips out to a small island in eastern Lake Ontario and shot approximately 900 cormorants and chicks on their nesting grounds. This outrageous and illegal slaughter of federally protected birds made national headlines, and as a National Audubon Society employee at the time, I was horrified, but also provoked to somehow use this event in a way that would hopefully elicit support and understanding for these increasingly common and unglamorous water birds.

I’d seen many thousands of cormorants during my years working for Audubon in Maine’s Muscongus Bay, but I knew nothing of the complaints of freshwater fishermen and others in different parts of the country who were blaming the fish-eating birds for a precipitous decline in the numbers of Smallmouth Bass, Yellow Perch, and other prized sport species. I soon found out that the situation in Lake Ontario and other fresh-water bodies was far more complex than first thought, and that a careful exploration of the overall ecology there would need to go back more than a hundred years in order to tell the true story of why attractive game fish had significantly declined. The nesting colony on Little Galloo Island had ballooned over a 20-year period, and cormorants were thus a very easy bird to blame for a bad day’s fishing — but the truth of the matter took a lot of digging.

As I learned about the effects of decades of heavy commercial fishing on the Great Lakes, the building of the St. Lawrence Seaway, the introduction of Zebra Mussels, and a variety of other key influences that eventually led to a much-reduced overall biodiversity, I decided to create an in-depth school curriculum that would reveal different sides of the issue. (See Appendix A below for specifics). It also seemed like a good idea at the time to come up with some way to directly engage students’ emotions, because this was a highly charged issue and I wanted students to share some of that intensity. I decided to create a mock town meeting, where girls and boys would be in front of their peers, role-playing the current-day drama as cormorant supporters, cormorant “haters,” and those with neutral positions. They’d be anglers, marina owners, conservationists, hotel owners, birdwatchers, etc.

This kind of staged event, complete with props and costumes, would be the culmination of sharing the backdrop of historical and scientific truths about a bird that famously prefers to eat fish. My intent was to offer up a memorable experience in developing critical-thinking skills, so that students as young as 5th-grade could understand the facts, the feelings, and the local livelihoods being affected, and then make their own decisions about how best to handle burgeoning cormorant populations in an area dependent on summer tourism and sport fishermen.

This was no small task, but it was great fun and eventually I came up with a multi-day,  multimedia program, which I tried out successfully in a school in my home town of Garrison, New York, USA, and which I then took to 6th-graders in a school upstate only miles away from where the actual shootings took place, near Watertown, New York. I was absolutely thrilled that the superintendent, principal, and teachers in the very area that galvanized national headlines were open to the idea of an Audubon educator bringing to their school a program I was calling “Exploring the Cormorant Controversy.” I was also a little bit nervous.

I mention all this now, in 2021, some 20 years after presenting a number of these week-long programs, because the issues of human-wildlife controversies are expanding, as is understandable due to human population growth and encroachment. And at least two such examples are becoming much more common, at least here in the East — Canada Geese pooping all over golf courses, parks, and freshwater beaches, and deer decimating home gardens and turning regional forests into depauperized remnants of what they once were.

It’s very easy, I’ve found, to hate deer who eat all the buds and edibles on our newly planted shrubs, flowers, and other tasty plants, as well as to refer to Canada Geese as noisy pests, whose innumerable droppings pose threats to recreation and health. Having these feelings of resentment toward specific animals is nothing unusual — it’s been going on for much of human history. However, the other side of the coin does exist, and by that I mean one can investigate and ultimately gain an historical and scientific picture of why, in fact, these aforementioned three animals, for example, have come to be so common. With research, one can find out that there are events and reasons for why this is so — not that it makes the threat of deer eating your flowers any less annoying or enraging, though. And in thinking further about this, I’ve come to believe that there is probably no real equivalency between a habitat-limited water bird that most people are completely unaware of and the extremely widespread populations of White-tailed Deer and Canada Geese, whose presence and behaviors affect vastly more people and more ecosystems.

The common denominator, I think, is that even if you know why some animals are proliferating, it doesn’t change the overall equation of wanting them out of the picture. And now some of our regional neighbors here in Putnam County, New York are complaining about the return of beavers to area wetlands where their dam-building ultimately floods adjacent properties or roads. Other folks post notices on their local Facebook pages of their fear of coyotes attacking either them or their small children or pets. And some want all the “terrifying little gartersnakes” in their neighborhood to somehow magically disappear. To say nothing about spiders. The list goes on…

Is there a remedy for all this? Education is the obvious one, and the cormorant-controversy school programs turned out to be a remarkable, memorable, and inspiring group of educational experiments. While many residents on eastern Lake Ontario blamed the cormorants for eating up all the good fish, biologists eventually studied stomach contents and “pellets” of a large number of the birds, and found that they eat mostly non-sport fish such as alewives, shiners, and sticklebacks. The birds do, however, eat a small but important percentage of Smallmouth Bass and Yellow Perch. When the students learned this, along with all the other historical facts, they realized that blaming cormorants for the area’s decline in sport fish was quite short-sighted. In the process, they gained critical-thinking skills, which are so often tragically missing at all levels of American society. Students typically voted at the end of their mock town meetings to conduct some kind of management on the cormorant nesting grounds, such as oiling eggs, an act that renders them non-viable. They weren’t in favor, though, of shooting or other lethal means.

Dealing with deer and geese (as well as other suburban and urban animals) is much more challenging due to the obvious reasons of their widespread ranges and increasing numbers. Perhaps creating new and similarly engaging school presentations would help educate our younger citizens about the complexity of how an ecosystem works, with all the inter-relationships going on, both naturally and with humans.

I still don’t have an answer to the deer and geese issues. I did just build two 60-foot circles of fencing around areas of native shrubs I want to protect from the hungry deer who live in the woods behind our house, and I’m not soon going to swim in a pond where the geese have added their earthy contributions to the grass and beach. We could re-establish the wolf population here in New York and New England, which I think would do wonders for keeping down the deer population. The idea of bringing back natural predators seems logical and scientifically literate, doesn’t it? That, however, would be inviting a whole new controversy, one that would probably make all the others seem quite insignificant in terms of drama, noise, and emotion…

Appendix A: Suggested steps in creating a human-wildlife controversy unit

Introduce the controversy with a story, photos, or a video.

Give students a chance to possibly forge an emotional attachment with the animal in question. Have them draw/describe it in words. If available, use a taxidermy mount, or see live specimens, if possible. Read what others have said about it.

Investigate how this animal survives. Explore its adaptations through dressing up like the animal, as well as through science activities and games. (For example, in the case of learning about a waterproof bird like a cormorant, students would wear rain pants and raincoats… and also assume webbed feet through the use of swimming-pool flippers, goggles over the eyes (to show how cormorants can see underwater), needle-nosed pliers for the bill, etc.)

Explore what its year is like. Create a timeline through pictures and words keyed to different months of the year. String it out in the classroom so that the animal’s life cycle can be clearly shown. Address questions such as how old is it when it breeds and during what time of the year does it breed? How long does it care for and feed its young? How old are the young when they become self-sufficient? 

Discover where it lives. What is its range? Make maps and display them.

See the animal in action through movies, video clips, etc., and observe, if possible, how it lives within an ecological community.

Examine the history of this animal with humans. Research key historical events and come up with mini, theatrical skits to act them out. Create necessary props for these skits. Give out acting roles to students. Practice. Put it on. Process. Ask students, what did you see happening? What are some themes being illustrated? (For example, coastal birds like cormorants had their eggs taken in large numbers by “commercial eggers” during past centuries and were thus sold as a commercial item. We created a skit and acted out this practice.)

Create a mock town meeting. This requires a lot of work beforehand. A) Decide upon five (suggested number) different representative groups, such as two FOR the animal, two AGAINST the animal, and one neutral. For example, in the case of deer, one group might be deer hunters wanting more access to suburban areas, and one group might represent farmers and aggrieved members of local garden clubs. On the other side, one group could be an animal rights group and one could be a local Brownies troop wanting to protect deer for sentimental reasons.  A neutral group could be the town board/council. B) Give each group some background material to read and to study. Have each group create X number of individual characters, with names and business/organizational affiliations, and write a particular point of view. (For example, “I’m Jim Wilson and I own a gun shop and I believe the deer are over-running our area and we need more hunters.”) Encourage outfits and props. Have the groups practice sample speeches so they are ready to defend their point of view in a class-wide town meeting, while staying in character.  C) On the day of the mock town meeting, set up the class with some seating in front, facing an audience. Groups can have signs made up beforehand, advertising their point of view. D) The teacher acts as a moderator, stating why the meeting is being held, indicating when the different groups speak, facilitating a Q-&-A period, and taking the final vote after all points of view have been heard. Ask the students to eventually vote on a specific question such as, do you recommend to the town to spray insecticides on the marsh to get rid of mosquitoes? or do you recommend to the town to open a special hunting season on cormorants? Or geese? Have students vote based on their own personal feelings and NOT based on what role they took in the town meeting.

Process what happened during the entire unit. What did students learn? Did opinions change? If so, why or why not? What activities worked well and what could use improvement? Are there other controversies which could be studied in the same way?

Pete Salmansohn is a naturalist and environmental educator based in Garrison, New York, US, which is nestled in the Hudson River watershed. He spent 39 summers on the coast of Maine working for the National Audubon Society’s Hog Island Camp and Puffin Project. Through this work, he assumed the moniker “Puffin Pete,” which he uses on his blog, Puffin Pete Salmansohn on Environmental Education, Nature, and Social Ecology at puffinpete.net. The core text of this article was originally published on the blog on May 5th, 2021.