Natural History
In 2010, the estimate of cormorant population, considered a nuisance, ranged from 14,000 to 16,000. A Fish and Wildlife commissioner said that the ideal population would be 3,300 or about 3 per 1 square kilometre (0.39 sq mi). Cormorants had disappeared from the lake (and all northern lakes) due to the use of DDT in the 1940s and 1950s.
Ring-billed gulls are also considered a nuisance. Measures have been taken to reduce their population. Authorities are attempting to encourage the return of black crowned night herons, cattle egrets, great blue herons, which disappeared during the time DDT was being used.
Read more about this topic: Lake Champlain
Famous quotes containing the words natural history, natural and/or history:
“The use of natural history is to give us aid in supernatural history: the use of the outer creation, to give us language for the beings and changes of the inward creation.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“The open frontier, the hardships of homesteading from scratch, the wealth of natural resources, the whole vast challenge of a continent waiting to be exploited, combined to produce a prevailing materialism and an American drive bent as much, if not more, on money, property, and power than was true of the Old World from which we had fled.”
—Barbara Tuchman (1912–1989)
“In history an additional result is commonly produced by human actions beyond that which they aim at and obtain—that which they immediately recognize and desire. They gratify their own interest; but something further is thereby accomplished, latent in the actions in question, though not present to their consciousness, and not included in their design.”
—Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831)