What am I on about? The General Licence is the list of birds that can be controlled without special dispensation being sought. Pigeons are a good example as a crop destroying pest. Very recently Chris Packham questioned the whole existence of GL and that is in part why Natural England are holding this review.
Believe me, it does not matter where you live or what you fish for. Cormorants are the biggest threat to our sport. Even stocked carp and trout are at risk from the annual winter immigration of tens of thousands of cormorants from Europe. Cormorants are the reason why our smaller rivers are all but denuded of roach, barbel and perch. Cormorants are stripping our stills of quality roach, rudd, bream and perch , leaving us with fish often only of a few ounces.
As I write there could be up-to 60 thousand cormorants in the UK now, each bird eating a pound or more fish each and every day. Forty years ago, there was not this foreign influx and the 2 thousand UK indigenous cormorants did little or no harm to our fresh waters. At present, we are allowed to cull 3 thousand birds annually – a number that does nothing to stem the slaughter we are seeing every winter. Putting cormorants on the General Licence could at last give us the chance we have been denied to save our fisheries.
Go to the Angling Trust website and click onto their cormorant information. There the Trust will tell you more, will direct you towards the Natural England questionnaire and even instruct you how to fill it in. It is a chore but one, PLEASE, you must take 20 minutes to carry it out. After all, what is that in the context of an angling lifetime?
It pains me to write this. I love birds. I relish kingfishers, grebes, swallows, swifts, cuckoos, all the birds that complete the perfect fishing scene. But in this one and only instance we must be bold, stand firm and act. Every single one of us, please!