Cormorants

The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers has stopped shooting double-crested cormorants after the huge colony of seabirds vacated their nesting grounds at the mouth of the Columbia River.

A federal district court judge found the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers broke the law in approving a plan to kill cormorants on the Columbia River, but he allowed the plan to go forward.

Officials say thousands of cormorants have abandoned their nests on an island in the Columbia River and they don’t know why.

Dozens of protesters rallied outside the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service office in Portland Tuesday. They’re calling for federal officials to stop killing cormorants on the Columbia River.

The public is getting its first glimpse of the government’s killing of thousands of sea birds near Astoria.

A final cormorant management plan released by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers calls for the killing of around 26,000 birds to protect threatened and endangered salmon and steelhead.