Cormorants in Sardinia are gobbling up fish at an unsustainable rate, threatening the local economy and depleting fish stock, according to a national fishing association.
Some 12,0000 cormorants are choosing to winter in Sardinia, with each bird guzzling around 500 grams of fish per day during its five-month stay, said the national federation of fishing cooperatives, Federcoopesca.
This means the birds are making off with 1,000 tons of fish that would otherwise help preserve local stock or benefit fishermen, said the federation.
Sardinia has long been a popular spot for cormorants, drawn by its convenient location in the middle of the Mediterranean, its abundant wetlands and its mild climate.
However, the situation has become problematic in recent years, since cormorants were classed as a protected species under European Union legislation.
This means they can now only be shot under special circumstances, and fishermen say this change is to blame for a massive upsurge in the cormorant population visiting Sardinia, which has grown at five percent annually since 1998.
And according to Federcoopesca, the problem is not just restricted to Sardinia.
Fishermen in Veneto, Emilia Romagna, Tuscany and Lombardy have all reported difficulties with cormorants and the federation is considering raising the issue with officials in Brussels.
Although the EU set up a Europe-wide project some years ago in a bid to strike a balance between protecting cormorants and the needs of fishermen, Federcoopesca says not enough has been done.
It wants the EU to authorize carefully managed culling programs and is demanding the Italian government fork up compensation for loss of earnings.
But environmentalists are up in arms over the fishermen's requests.
The Italian League for the Protection of Birds (LIPU) says there is no evidence that shooting cormorants will protect the fish.
At best, the cormorants are scared away for a few weeks but they always come back, it says.
Furthermore, as cormorants tend to respond to fish numbers rather than limit them, any birds killed are soon replaced with cormorants from other areas, LIPU claims.
This in turn means that any culling would have to be coordinated at a European level, with experts suggesting up to 60,000 birds would need to be killed each year in order to make any real difference.
"Ecological methods" are more effective and practical, provided they are used carefully, said LIPU.
It said scaring off the cormorants was the best way to deal with the problem, using acoustic devices to reproduce noises made by predators and installing moving mechanisms to discourage birds from landing.
"Used elsewhere, such techniques have provided real solutions to the problem of overcrowding," said LIPU.
