Of all the issues related to Lake Champlain management, none stirs up more emotional response than cormorants. What appears to be a pest to some represents a balance in the lake's ecology to others.

The double-breasted cormorant is not native to Lake Champlain. The first reports of the migratory seabirds on the lake were in the early 1930s, but the species did not establish a significant population here until the 1980s.

And when they set up homemaking, they did so with a bang. Numbers of nesting adults grew so rapidly that the birds destroyed the vegetation on Young Island in Vermont and at least one of the Four Brothers Islands of Willsboro in New York waters.

What happens is this: The birds nest in trees located on the island, and as they raise their young in those trees, they create large quantities of guano, which in turn kills the vegetation below them, forcing the cormorants to nest on the ground in future years.

One of the Four Brothers Islands is a perfect example: Decades ago, it was an attractive place with a majestic forest of white pine growing peacefully there for who knows how long. But the cormorants set up housekeeping on the island, and the vegetation was doomed. Today, it looks more like a wasteland than a pristine island, at least to the casual observer.

Everyone seems to agree that too many cormorants is not a good idea, and cormorant control has taken many forms over the past several years. Wildlife biologists focused on Young Island a few years ago, oiling the eggs so they would not hatch and physically capturing and euthanizing adults.

But that had some negative consequences: The birds simply moved away from the island, which sits just north of the Grand Isle-to-Cumberland Head ferry crossing and joined their cousins already living on Four Brothers Islands.

Four Brothers is privately owned by the Nature Conservancy, and that agency has balked at any control measures on cormorants on the islands, which act as breeding grounds for several different species of birds. Officials there said they wanted to study the issue more thoroughly before starting any kind of control efforts.

This year, the owners have agreed to a proposal to use the egg-oiling practice to reduce the number of cormorants on the islands, but with a twist. Researchers have oiled almost all of the eggs on the two islands that still have a good amount of vegetation growing on them while oiling only a percentage of eggs on the other two islands.

The hope is that the adult cormorants, who sit patiently on their nests waiting for their eggs to hatch, will notice that more eggs are hatching on the other islands and will move there for the next effort at creating new generations.

If this works, a certain number of cormorants will stay on those islands but nesting will be dramatically reduced elsewhere, and the birds will not be scared away to find new sites, as they did at Young Island.

To us, that sounds like a fair plan. It will help to control the number of cormorants on the lake, protect other islands while allowing the diversity that the seabirds bring to Lake Champlain.

Anglers and other interest groups have said they want no cormorants on the lake, but officials say the lake's abundant fish supply can support a controlled population of cormorants. And some say the birds favor another nuisance that has entered the lake: alewives.

If that's the case, they will be doing us a favor while we control their numbers as best we can.