Avian Antifa & Halloween

It’s trick or treat, right out of the horror film, “The Birds”. And just in time for Halloween. It’s the Avian Antifa and they are terrorizing the poor fish on D’Arbonne and other area lakes.

The Avian Antifa are hundreds of migrating, protected birds — huge fluffy white pelicans and ugly spear beaked black cormorants. They start coming every fall about Halloween. But they are more scary than any costume you’ll see, especially every four years when the lake’s fish population is forced into about a fourth of the lake’s usual water surface. You want to know why?

That’s when the cormorants and pelicans feast on fish flesh. And if you don’t think that impacts you, then you aren’t a fisherman.

An adult pelican will eat up to FOUR POUNDS of fish a day.

An adult cormorant will eat ONE POUND of fish a day.

If there are 250 pelicans and 250 cormorants on the lake at a time (and that’s a conservative estimate when it gets colder), that is 1,250 pounds of fish a day they are eating out of Lake D’Arbonne. That includes minnows, bream and catfish and even pretty good size gamefish like bass and crappie. That doesn’t count the ones that get away. How many times have you caught a two pound crappie with a beak-hole punched in its back or side?

Multiply that number times 90, because they usually stay about three months (90 days) and all of a sudden you realize these birds take more fish out of the lake than the fishermen do. And the really good news? They are federally protected so even though they are extremely overpopulated and nothing but a nuisance, you can’t do anything about it.

And those numbers I mentioned? That should also give you and idea of how much bird poop is going into the lake every day from pelicans and cormorants.

You still think they’re pretty?