{"id":44654,"date":"2025-08-04T13:32:07","date_gmt":"2025-08-04T13:32:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/44654\/"},"modified":"2025-08-04T13:32:07","modified_gmt":"2025-08-04T13:32:07","slug":"we-need-to-talk-about-the-cormorants","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/44654\/","title":{"rendered":"We Need To Talk About the Cormorants"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I recently wrote about <a href=\"https:\/\/www.torontomike.com\/2025\/08\/toronto-island-discovery-tour\/\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">my tour of the Toronto Island with Warren Hoselton<\/a>. It was mainly a walking tour, but there was some water taxi action as well. There&#8217;s a stretch west of Centre Island by Hanlon&#8217;s Point where the trees have been overwhelmed by cormorants. We&#8217;re talking thousands of them, roosting densely.<\/p>\n<p>The problem, as you might see in the photo above I shot Friday night, is that cormorant guano, which is a nice way of saying shit, is toxic. It&#8217;s literally killing the trees, and it smells like&#8230;. well, it&#8217;s something else. Rotten seafood would be a preferable alternative.<\/p>\n<p>It&#8217;s a delicate matter, obviously. Cormorants are indigenous and were fine in Tommy Thompson Park, but the Toronto Island has a rather delicate ecosystem and I&#8217;ve seen with my own eyes the damage done to the tree canopy. But the wrench in the plans to displace the cormorants came in the form of a couple of bald eagles who made their home on the island. With the bald eagles there, plans to get the cormorants back to Tommy Thompson Park were halted.<\/p>\n<p>Meanwhile, I&#8217;ve discovered a great name for a rock band: Toxic Guano.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"I recently wrote about my tour of the Toronto Island with Warren Hoselton. It was mainly a walking&hellip;\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":44655,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[26],"tags":[49,48,66,323],"class_list":{"0":"post-44654","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-wildlife","8":"tag-ca","9":"tag-canada","10":"tag-science","11":"tag-wildlife"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44654","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=44654"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44654\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/44655"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=44654"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=44654"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=44654"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}