Cormorants Fouling Minnesota Lake with 14,500 lbs. of Guano Annually

KARE-TV

Each fall, thousands of cormorants gather in the trees along the shores of Augusta Lake in Mendota Heights. However, the water below them has been paying the ultimate price. 

“Fourteen thousand five hundred pounds of bird poop is a lot of bird poop,” said Joe Nunez, a resident right on the water. More

23 Comments on Cormorants Fouling Minnesota Lake with 14,500 lbs. of Guano Annually

  1. The cormorants are aquatic birds like ducks or geese. What is the difference between them perching in the trees or floating in the water? Poop will be in the water either way.

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  2. How many pounds of fish shit won’t go into the water because of the fish those cormorants eat? Of course, some of the cormorant shit comes from those eaten fish. It’s an interesting recursive question.

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  3. The lake is pea green with algae and soupy. The cormorants are stopping off on their migration adding their waste to the waters before they move on. The area has a lot of lakes, so they probably dine on other, less nasty bodies of water while they’re there. To make matters worse, the lake doesn’t drain properly so it acts as a big manure pond like you see on the industrial farms.

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  4. When we were kids we used to get permit to shoot them if we caught them setting up shop at the hatchery. Cormorants, mergansers and sometimes herons, but no osprey or eagles.

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  5. Cormorants are a protected bird by the Feds. I use to be a duck hunting fool. I also use to fish the tournament trail for bass. They never bothered me. Why all the hate.

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  6. @ Bad_Brad SATURDAY, 19 JULY 2025, 20:58 AT 8:58 PM

    No hate. The Department of Game gave the kids in Jr Bucks & Does the permits because they were wiping out the fish pens. They used to raise salmon and steelhead and had massive pens on American Lake they put them in once they got a certain size.

  7. My dad was fishing out at Fishtrap Lake in western Spokane county years ago and had some cormorants stealing his fish which he had caught. He wasn’t very happy about that. What surprises me more than the cormorants is that occasionally we even have pelicans show up in this area especially on the Columbia River S. of the tri cities in SE Wash, state.

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  8. JDHasty

    Totally get it my friend. The town of Red Bluff has several fish ladders headed up stream on the Sacramento river. Recently they put bird netting around most. Guess why?

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  9. Yea, they had netting at the hatcheries, but these pens were immense. If we shot a few of them a couple times/week the birds stayed back. If they got comfortable before long the whole damn lake was fish eating birds shoulder to shoulder.

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  10. @ geoff the aardvark SATURDAY, 19 JULY 2025, 22:08 AT 10:08 PM

    When we were shooting a lot of prairie dogs in Phillips County MT forty years ago the gulls from Ft Peck Reservoir would come eat them in the evenings. The Bureau of Land Management had released black footed ferrets because of the immense number of prairie dogs up there then but they still needed the prairie dogs shot off because the population was growing out of control. They couldn’t poison them because they were reestablishing the endangered ferrets.

    Basically they needed a very dense population of prairie dogs, but not so dense that the prairie dogs would experience an epidemic and all die out. Prairie dogs, Richardson ground squirrels, Jack rabbits etc do not have stable populations, they build up, then the population explodes and they get sick and almost all of them die off and then they build up again. The BLM needed a very dense population that was stable for a decade.

    But I diverge. The gulls would come by the hundreds, and hundreds and be covered in gore from beak to half way back every evening eating up those prairie dogs.

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  11. Would there be a way to pump and filter the water to strain out and concentrate the soupy shit into a viable fertilizer?

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