Possible Willard Walleye Fishery Enhancement?

[AllFish]

http://www.mprnews.org/story/2015/05/08/walleye
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[Beautiful-Fish]

Great idea, let's have year round open season on cormorants and all other fish eating birds !
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[TubeDude]

[#0000FF]Cormorants are not that big of a problem at Willard. We see a few of them but they don't eat nearly as many shad as grebes and terns...and seagulls.

On community ponds and other small waters however the cormorants eat more fish than are caught by anglers.

The biggest problem birds on some fisheries are the pelicans. They are especially bad on small tributary streams when cutts are upstream spawning. On Strawberry River the pelicans group up in two bunches...one upstream and one downstream. Then they move toward each other scooping up spawning cutts up to several pounds. Same problem on Blackfoot Reservoir in Idaho and on other waters. But they are protected migratory bird so they cannot be molested.
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[Beautiful-Fish]

The DWR should let us blast them. After all, are they not just flying interstate poachers ?
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[DKStroutfitter]

The DWR isn't the problem.
Once again it's our Federal Government.
The Feds have protected these birds, making it illegal to kill them.

The DWR is working with the Feds to try to find a good solution to the problem.
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[Gemcityslayer]

[quote Beautiful-Fish]The DWR should let us blast them. After all, are they not just flying interstate poachers ?blast them. after all, are they not just flying interstate poachers ?[/quote]

No offense but I doubt they'd let every yahoo out there go around and start "blasting" them.

Nor would I want them to. Talk about a dangerous mess at the lake...

You can sometimes take this "protect the fish" logic too far. Can't we share a few shad with a few birds?[:/] Half of you wouldn't be able to find the boils without them anyways[]
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[Gemcityslayer]

Those pelicans are amazing birds...

If memory serves me right I've seen them gobble up hordes of carp - too bad we can't just train them to do that!. I imagine they'd gobble up any fish they see... I've seen them eat stuff a little too big... that can be funny.
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[TubeDude]

[#0000FF]It's the same thing with sea lions off the Pacific coast. Formerly considered endangered they are still protected...while they wantonly slaughter thousands of returning salmon and steelhead. And in some places they form "wolf packs" that follow sport fishing boats and make it impossible to get a hooked fish to the boat.

In days of old...when I worked on commercial and party boats out of southern Cal we were able to use sea lion "repellent". In addition to weighted cherry bombs we were able to "force feed" them pieces of lead...from the rifle we kept in the wheelhouse. Those noisy appetites learned to stay away or suffer the consequences. Although those that learned the hardest lessons seldom lived long enough to benefit from them.

I have a personal grudge against cormorants and pelicans. A couple of my favorite small chub ponds get periodically raided by those flying vacuum cleaners and it takes a couple of years for them to come back enough to make a worthwhile minnow run.

Here's a picture of what I found on my first minnow run of the year a couple of years ago. There were more pelicans than minnows. The pelicans were herding the schools of minnows into shallow corners and then they would all plunge their beaks down at once to scoop up the bunched minnows.

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[TrulineRick]

Well said TD. As a former captain of a So Cal sportboat I know exactly what you mean. I remember the skipper shooting at the sea lions with 60 plus passengers. Back in the early 2000s a skipper on the Pursuit put a seal bomb in a mackerel and fed it to a giant sea lion inside the slips @ 22 nd St landing and got more jail than O J Simpson did..
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[TubeDude]

[#0000FF]The sea lions inside the harbors are really getting to be aggressive. There are several videos out about guys holding fish for pictures and having sea lions lunge out of the water and grab the fish.

There was one last week...down in San Diego I think...where a sea lion came after a yellowtail a guy was holding and grabbed the guy by the arm. Dragged him to the bottom and it almost killed him. Here's the writeup from a website:

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SAN DIEGO, CALIFORNIA —
A San Diego fisherman posing with his big catch says he was dragged underwater by a sea lion! The beginning of the attack was captured in a photo, the moment the terror began for Dan Carlin. It happened on their boat in the Mission Bay channel in early April.
Carlin thinks he was struggling with the sea lion for about 20 seconds before he broke free.
The Carlins want to warn people to stay clear of the sea lions.

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When I was decking on one of the boats out of Newport Harbor the sea lions got wise to the rifle coming out of the wheel house. They would stay around the stern...stealing incoming fish...until the gun came out. Then they dove. I fixed a few of them by strapping on an old 40 cal Russian pistol and doing a sudden fast-draw over the stern rail. "Educated" a few sneaky sea lions at point blank range. You might say they "lost their mind".

I had long since moved away when I learned that those vermin had been given protected status. And that's when the horror stories really got worse.

More jail time than OJ? Reminds me of the question about "remember all of the Caucasians that rioted when OJ was acquitted?
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[TrulineRick]

That's insane. Back in 87 when I worked as a deckhand on the old Redondo barge we had a small run on firecracker yellowtail for a few days and if I remember correctly we only landed about 2 out of maybe 40 hook ups😁😁😁. I can't tell you how many times I had to move(get away from the sea lions)the boat after finding large schools of barracuda of Rocky point. One of the reasons I gave up my lifelong dream was because of the Marine Mammal Act that was passed in the mid 2000s along with the Sierra club. When I left in 2007 they wanted to close 500 miles of prime California coast.
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[AllFish]

The gist of it is, some states take their walleye populations serious enough to protect their food source, even with what may seem to some as extreme measures.

According to the article, by reducing the cormorants, the walleye population improved markedly.

Interesting to see what other states will do to protect a desired fish species..
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[TubeDude]

[#0000FF]SOME states might take positive steps toward protecting and improving their walleye fisheries. But Utah has always been trout oriented. A lot of the silly regulations are in place to protect trout...at the expense of anglers who would rather fish for other species. (no live bait, etc.) Walleyes have always been pretty much left to their own devices. And in some waters they have done well IN SPITE OF the lack of support by state agencies.
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