The great cormorant has had a good run.

Driven to the brink of extinction by hunters and pesticides in the 1970s, the fish-eating waterbird was rescued thanks to one of the EU’s earliest environmental laws. On paper, that regulation represents a triumph for conservationists: Over the past 50 years, the cormorant population has grown from roughly 50,000 birds to between 1.5 and 2 million across Europe.

But 10 EU countries now consider the aquatic species a menace that needs to be contained.

The demand comes in a joint letter to Environment Commissioner Jessika Roswall and Fisheries Commissioner Costas Kadis, seen exclusively by POLITICO. Sixteen agriculture and environment ministers from Estonia, Sweden, Finland, Latvia, Lithuania, Slovakia, Croatia, Poland, the Czech Republic and Romania want the cormorant added to the list of huntable species under the EU’s flagship nature law, the 1979 Birds Directive.

They are also pressing Brussels to set coordinated population targets across the bloc and to make it easier to shoot the bird outside hunting season.

Estonian Agriculture Minister Hendrik Johannes Terras, who helped coordinate the letter, argued that the EU should be as willing to control cormorants as it is to control other predators. The bloc has loosened protections on wolves in recent years, and several countries cull invasive mink and raccoon dogs to protect ground-nesting birds.

“If we are prepared to limit the number of smaller predators to protect bird species, then why shouldn’t we reduce predation pressure to protect fish?” he told POLITICO. “Nature should be viewed as a whole.”

In the May 7 letter, the ministers blame cormorants, each capable of eating half a kilo of fish a day, for hammering inland fish stocks and emptying aquaculture ponds. Industry estimates put the damage to European fisheries and aquaculture at more than €350 million a year.

In Estonia’s coastal waters, Terras said, cormorants eat about 20,000 metric tons of fish a year, almost twice the catch of the country’s coastal fishermen.

The ministers warn of “serious damage to ecosystems” and “implications for food security,” and urge the Commission to make the “necessary legislative changes.”

The letter lands ahead of next Tuesday’s meeting of agriculture and fisheries ministers in Brussels and in the middle of a Commission review of the EU’s nature laws — a “stress test” launched as part of a wider drive to cut red tape, with a public consultation running until August.

The Commission has so far resisted the push. Roswall’s department issued more flexible guidance in March; the ministers say it isn’t enough. A Commission spokesperson said the existing rules give national authorities sufficient room to address cormorant damage, and that governments should try non-lethal methods first. Asked whether Brussels would consider making the bird huntable, the spokesperson declined to comment, citing the ongoing review.

Conservation groups, meanwhile, say culling won’t fix the problem. Researchers at Stockholm University concluded last year that commercial fishing takes around three times as many Baltic fish as seals and cormorants combined.

It is not the first time EU countries have pushed for loosening cormorant protections. Sweden raised the issue in September and in October 2024, each time backed by a coalition of Baltic and Central European countries.