Driving to work early this morning I witnessed a sight I have never seen before, despite my decade and a half working and living in the Norfolk Broads. In the distance the flock of large birds beat across the horizon from right to left and I assumed it was skein of geese. My road took me straight towards them and as I approached the bridge over the narrows at Filby Broad, they passed right over me just thirty feet above the X-Trail. I tried to count them, staggered by the number. It was a flock of cormorants, at least eighty strong, heading north towards the large open Broads of Hickling and Barton, no doubt. While used to seeing six to a dozen in the air together .. or gathered on bare lightning-struck trees along the rivers, I have never seen this amount at one time. I understand that a gathering of cormorants is called a colony or flight. Though I would venture another name. A trawl of cormorants. For the collective threat to the fish stocks on Norfolks waterways of this number of birds is considerable, though I doubt catastrophic. 
The problem for Phalacrocorax Carbo, a problem which it will never know or understand, is that (like the badger) its continued success as a species also nurtures a growing campaign of antipathy from the genus which can both protect it .. or subdue it. The view from homo sapiens, as always, is subjective. If you love wildlife that hunts efficiently, you'll love cormorants. It doesn't mean though, that you wouldn't control them if asked to. Let me qualify 'subjective'. If those eighty birds I saw this morning landed around the perimeter of Hickling Broad and spread themselves out to fish economically, no-one would give a hoot. Yet if just a quarter of that 'trawl' landed around a shallow, half-acre private fishery where fee paying anglers have struggled to sustain a sporting stock .. there will be calls for culls. Understandably. For this bird can dive to 10 metres and eat 2lb of fish stock a day. Now, let's take 'subjective' a little further? If you are the avian equivalent of a mink (and while soaring across the waterways of Norfolk) you see the choice between sitting on a dead branch, waiting for a passing perch .. or splashing down in an enclosed lake brimming with trout .. what would you do? From my perspective, the bird is just doing what it has evolved to do and equally the angler has just as much right to intervene as the gamekeeper does to stop the fox stealing his poults. Or the arable farmer requesting a cull on wood pigeons. It shouldn't need special licensing. The law should be simple. If the bird has chosen to feed from privately stocked water, it should forfeit its protection.
From cormorants to badgers, where a similar situation exists. The current media attention surrounding potential badger culling due to the spread of bovine TB is mainly vested in the public perception that Brock the Badger is the ursine, father-like figure portrayed in those old fifties style books and cartoons. Like the cormorant mentioned earlier, which used to be slaughtered indiscriminately by our fore-fathers, modern wildlife legislation has drawn a cloak of protection around the badger which will only ever end in disaster. Before I make my case, let me state something clearly. I love to see badgers, as I love to see all British wildlife. Four years ago I was invited to undertake grey squirrel control with my air rifles on a wonderful 1000 acre old-money estate close to my home in Norfolk. Much of my Wildanglia blog is reported from there and the wildlife I have been able to photograph there has been pure privilege. In that first autumn, exploring the estate, I counted four badger setts. One was the largest I (personally) had ever seen. Last weekend, on a deliberate survey of the estate undertaken due to the amount of badger droppings I've encountered recently, I recorded fifteen distinctively different colonies. That largest sett has doubled in size. There are even small setts under the Hall, in the garden escarpment. The estate farms two cattle herds, yet there isn't a move among the estate staff to remove the incumbent badgers. So why are the badgers annoying me? Because they are trashing the surrounding landscape with their delving and foraging. 
The estate rides are littered with badger scat .. unusual for a creature that tidies up after itself like a domestic cat (digging a scoop). Hare and rabbit runs have become wide paths. The low under-carriage of meles meles swiftly erodes the vegetation. Their paw prints are abundant around the muddy pools. Most of all though, it is their bullish hooliganism that I resent. The total disregard for habitat. They push over the pheasant feeders, uproot spring bulbs and bulldoze the newly planted saplings to get at the roots and sprigs. Old Brock (and his progeny) can vacuum a partridge nest in seconds. They will dig out a rabbit stop in minutes, devouring the kits .. though perhaps that's a bonus? They are clean animals, for sure. Someone asked me, only today, if I can scent badgers. I can't .. unlike the rank musk of fox which I can smell a hundred yards off. The badger is so meticulous in its domestic housekeeping that I have often recovered the bones and skulls of its dead dragged from the sett along with the old nesting materials. My concern on this estate is for the Old Hall itself. The tunnelling around here lends me to believe that I will motor up the drive one day to find that the whole structure has sunk into the surrounding escarpment. Like those cormorants, common sense says that there should be recourse, within the law, to balance an over-population of any species if the intention is honest. After all .. that's what Mother Nature does to us.
