Cormorants eat their fill at Lorenzi Park pond

While Canada geese, ring-necked ducks and mallards waited for handouts Tuesday at Lorenzi Park, a lone cormorant seemed uninterested in bread crumbs a visitor tossed into the pond.

Instead, the cormorant -- one of the double-crested varieties of this large, water bird typically found patrolling coastal areas -- had bigger fish to fry.

The slim, swift bird with its long, hooked bill swam from near the pond's east shore, frantically looking with its beady eyes to spot the silvery flash of a rainbow trout.

A sign attached to a post in chest-high water warns anglers that there's a "3 fish limit."

That's for people. Not for birds.

Diving once, the cormorant disappeared into the murky water only to pop up several yards away in what seemed like 20 seconds with an 8-inch-long trout squirming to free itself from the firm grip of the cormorant's orange bill.

There was no such luck for the trout.

With one flip of its ropelike neck, the cormorant positioned the trout head first and downward, then swallowed the fish whole with the trout's slimy tail disappearing in the bird's throat.

Seeing this excited a throng of a dozen or more cormorants. Some were perched on thick branches of trees jutting from one of the pond's two islands as the sun on the 70-degree February day dried out their feathers.

Others stood like statues near the water, waiting for a chance to snatch a wayward trout swimming near the island.

On the pond's south shore, fisherman Jim Gantt rolled a marble-sized wad of yellow-green dough bait between his hands so that it covered a hook.

Then, with the line baited, he hurled it in the direction of the cormorants, reeled up the slack and then rested his rod on the rock-faced rim of the pond.

"I got one," he said, adding, though, that the cormorants "eat up all the fish."

"They've got to eat, too. But the limit should be raised to six fish because when those cormorants are here they eat up the fish pretty fast," said Gantt, who fishes the Lorenzi Park pond "two or three times a week."

Another angler, Michael DeLong, blamed the cormorants for ganging up on the trout and then ambushing them. "And the one that catches the trout better eat it fast or the others will get it."

Gantt recalled one time he had hooked a trout and was reeling it in when a cormorant "came up and took the fish. That's how good they are."

DeLong estimates that one cormorant probably eats five or six trout a day.

With as many as two dozen cormorants seen at the lake, that translates to roughly 100 fish on days when the Nevada Department of Wildlife stocking truck shows up with trout fresh from a hatchery.

Department spokesman Doug Nielsen said Lorenzi Park is stocked with trout five times from December through January with as few as 600 fish and as many as 3,287, an average of roughly more than 1,000 fish per plant.

Nielsen, who also writes an outdoor column for the Review-Journal, said anglers sometimes complain about the cormorants that biologists believe migrate to the pond in the winter from as far away as Canada.

"You're kind of between a rock and a hard spot," Nielsen said.

"We have the trout stocking so we can provide a fishing activity. Then we have a cormorant population that comes through in the middle of winter and they eat fish."

Contact reporter Keith Rogers at krogers@ reviewjournal.com or at 702-383-0308.