How Ontario birds bounced back from the brink
To share more of what main speaker Warren Dunlop shared at the Kawartha Lakes Stewards Association spring meeting one must understand the word “extirpation.”
As Dunlop stated, some birds such as the double-crested cormorants, whose numbers have increased dramatically and have been considered nuisance birds because of this, were “on the brink of extirpation” in Ontario. Extirpation means the complete and total eradication or removal of something, in this case, various bird species, from a specific area or region. Dunlop states that the ban on pesticides, like DDT, facilitated their population recovery and also benefited many of our birds of prey and forest birds.
Wild turkeys were extirpated from Ontario in the early 1900s and reintroduced into southwest Ontario in 1984. Their population has now spread well beyond their historic range. The first occurrences in the Kawartha Lakes area were recorded in the mid-1990s.
The year 1970 is........
