Oh happy day

I don’t know how you feel about cold weather, but something happened the past couple of weeks that makes me really like it a lot more. It got so cold, most of the lake orks left D’Arbonne and headed further south! At least momentarily.

Lake orks is the term I use to describe cormorants, those big ugly long necked black birds with sixty inch long beaks that migrate south for warmer winters and eat our little fish by the hundreds of pounds. They almost put catfish farmers out of business in some areas. Our federal biologists say they only eat shad, but that’s more bull than you find on a 600-head cattle farm. They eat anything they can get their little beaks into, diving as deep as six feet to spear their prey. It wouldn’t be so bad, but everywhere you find a dozen, you find a hundred more right behind. For those of you who like them, a few of the really dumb ones hung around wondering where the others went.

The “endangered” birds are federally protected because their are only sixteen zillion of them now. US Fish and Wildlife Service numbers show that breeding pairs of lake orks has increased more than a thousand percent in recent years. Those numbers only show the increase from 1980 through 2007. No current counts are available, probably because there are too many of them now to count. The only thing that has grown more quickly than the ork population is the absurdity of Congress.

You can’t shoot one, kill one or even look sideways at one without breaking federal law. I’m glad none of them can read, because this would probably be considered “harassment” of the migratory bird.

Okay, enough ork bashing. I’m glad they’ve been gone, but I’m sure they will stop and pay us a visit on their way back up north. Oh happy day.

Cormorants like to invite a few white pelican buddies along to clean up any scraps of fish they might miss.