I am often told as in daily of the brightness, intelligence, genius, loftiness and brain power of Minnesotans by Minnesotans like Al Franken or those yammering at me over the airwaves.
Tonight though I found an interesting story, because on the great grassland sea of North America which Minnesota is a part of you would never think of finding pelicans, seagulls, terns and all sorts of ocean birds...and yet they come to the great heartland of America to rear their young.
In reality, years ago hunters and lake owners simply shot numbers of these vermin like cormorants, because they simply are devastating to the environment as they are like marrying a hungry widow with 14 children and 40 relatives. That though in sensitivity and international treaties stopped in the 1970's and the feds became quite testy tossing people in jail for keeping the natural balance.
The story though I listened to right from the Minnesota DNR's mouth was western Minnesota now has 20,000 breeding pairs of pelicans in one lake system.
20,000 anything is quite a number if you start naming it money, cars, soldiers or birds pooping in the lake. So I started considering just what 20,000 current breeding pairs means.
That means 40,000 birds which are probably on average in feeding themselves and young ones about 5 pounds of fish a day.
The fish they are eating though is not just carp or something cheap, but they corner game fish like walleyes which I priced today at $ 7.00 a fish. Fish that size would require 3 walleyes to feed one pelican.
As a sidenote, I once sat by a 3 acre slough and watched a flock of pelicans literally herd and consume millions of young frogs for a few days and in the end there were no frogs left and no pelicans either as they left when they frogs were all poop.
In doing the math, 3 fish for a 40 thousand pelicans is 120,000 fish a day. The pelicans are in Minnesota from May to October which is 153 days or a nice total of 18 million 360 thousand or 18,360,000 fish dead in one area of western Minnesota.
If you like pounds that is 9 million 180 thousand pounds of fish or 9,180,000 pounds of fish and at 7 dollars for 3 pounds you get $214,200,000 or 214 million two hundred thousand dollars.
The amusing part about this is Minnesota sportsmen are paying for this predation and it is not just pelicans, but cormorants to timber wolves dining on some of the most expensive delicacies in the world.
The same situations occur all kinds of protected species from hawks, eagle, seals to the fur bans literally destroying ecosystems all across America.
In the old days, landowners and cabin owners simply blasted a majority of this stuff to keep things in check, but now with everything protected and the feds acting like they work for Russia's Putin strewing Polonium 210 around for enemies of the state....a huge catastrophe to the environment is taking place causing billions of dollars in damage.
I can point right now to the absolute devastation of millions of acres in the arctic due to snow and blue geese numbers who the feds had "preserved" to the point they were eating themselves out of their breeding grounds. The feds decided to blast the geese as a last resort, but the environmental damage is done for a generation.
This is mismanagement by the federal government and international treaties which is destroying America and wildlife. In short, it is inflating food prices and causing a starvation process in American children, because mac and cheese is no replacement for a slab of meat protein to for a growing child.
These birds will simply destroy pristine areas of Minnesota and move on to other areas and states until their food source is wiped out. That is called extermination.
That also is the coming problem, because nature abhors over abundance and manufactures all kinds of diseases to wipe out too many of a bad thing. That is what will happen to the pelicans in some near future year and it will probably spread to other water birds and wipe out some species now already under stress from all the pelicans.
I can point to 3 plagues in my lifetime which I remember hitting western Minnesota. Around 1970, "redleg disease" hit the frog populations I used to remember as a child covered every lake with a purring mass to soothe a child to sleep. This was followed by another mystery disease which killed off all of the jackrabbits in the region around 1984 and this was followed by the mange which occurred in 1990 and wiped out the red fox and coyotes as a natural selection process.
This is what awaits the inept put wildlife on a shelf policy which does not allow cropping, but devastation of populations.
There is always something special on hot summer mornings to see the pelicans soaring in flocks and I really do not want to see the end of that sight no more than the frogs, the rabbits or the red fox which are rare now. This though is coming, because of bunny strangulation policies of loving wildlife to death.......and by the devastating numbers of almost a quarter of a billion dollars for one area of a state...it is the reality of starvation for people too.
Either America get some intelligence and starts using the resource as the greatest Conservationist Teddy Roosevelt advocated or America is going to loose vast swaths of it's wildlife as hunters are not hunting much any more due to costs and regulations and no one else was funding wildlife.
It is not going to be yoked to fishermen and taxpayers will not pay billions to feed a bird when they can't make house payments.
That is the reality of starvation. The international treaty and federal and state wildlife departments are broken and wildlife is dying in the numbers of millions for this stupidity.
18,360,000
