Only tray and cutlery are missing. For the rest the bank of the Piave at the height of Alano it resembles a self service restaurant. And the waiting customers - uninvited and non-paying - are the notorious cormorants. Three years of chatter and good intentions, which have not resolved the situation one iota, with the aggravating circumstance that the more time passes, the more these ichthyophagous birds they move north after decimating the fish in the Feltre area. Marble marbles have been banned for years for fishermen, but the mountain of money thrown away in releases has not produced results, so much so that there is always little fish in the watercourse. It was January 2018 when in Feltre there was a meeting promoted by the fishing basin 10 which was attended by the representatives of the basins 9 and 12, the Federation of the Basins and the Mediapiave which brings together the fishermen of the province of Treviso.
The letter to the Province calling for a check on the number of cormorants present, hoping the demolition of a certain number of specimens, has remained a dead letter. And so, the bird that is not native to the Belluno area proliferates undisturbed and the image published on the Facebook page of the fishing basin 10 is emblematic. «You want protect the repopulation of the Piave with the marble trout which is an indigenous animal ", says the president of Basin 10, Denis Zatta," the fishermen have given up on fishing, every year there is a cost of 10 thousand euros to enter from 30 to 40 thousand pieces of the river and yet we find ourselves with the half-empty stream of fish. I wonder where the logic lies.
From what is known, the Ispra (Institute for Environmental Protection and Research) has gotten across the board on the issue of abatements, the Province does not feel like forcing the hand, no indications come from the ministry ». The concept reiterated several times is that even the cormorant is a protected species, on a par with the marble trout: «It is a cat that bites its own tail. In the opinion of the fishermen the marmorata must take precedence in the protection over the cormorants. If only because the presence of cormorants is recent. It is not a typical bird of our area, such as the heron, which in any case does much less damage than the cormorant ». During the autumn scrubs, when the trout search the shallows to lay them eggs it is an extermination: «Fortunately», adds Zatta, «with our volunteers we have made some nice recovery.
Plus we have hunters who go hunting for game, but in the meantime they give us a hand by disturbing the cormorants. Since they can't take them down, at least. However, the battle remains unequal. Sorry because without the support and the positions taken by the institutions the situation is only going to get worse. Among other things, as the sockets in our area are starting to become scarce, the cormorants are increasingly going up the course of the Piave, also causing damage in other basins.". Next Sunday the annual meeting of Basin 10 will take place online and certainly, among the various topics on the table, fishermen will return to the cormorant issue again. For the moment still unresolved (Courier of the Alps).