Michigan DNR implements wildly successful cormorant restocking program in the UP

Unfortunately, that was not exactly what they had in mind:

"Earlier this month, the Department of Natural Resources and Environment planted 28,000 brown trout in the Ford River near Escanaba in the Upper Peninsula – right in front of about 500 hungry cormorants that dined for days on those $1 apiece fish.

The trout weighed two or three ounces each. A cormorant can eat easily a dozen a day. And brown trout are about as dumb as rocks.

Local anglers quickly figured out that a large percentage of those fish, paid for by angler’s license fees, went down the gullets of big black birds that will use the energy from the trout to produce more cormorants this summer."