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This Aug. 12, 2011, file photo shows cormorants on East Sand Island in the Columbia River.

(The Associated Press)

Federal officials are a day away from releasing their final plan to stop East Swan Island's cormorants from eating salmon swimming down the Columbia River.

The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers on Friday will publish a final environmental impact statement regarding the protected migratory bird that's in the agency's crosshairs for predating upon another protected species near the mouth of the Columbia.

Tentative plans announced in June call for killing 16,000 of the birds and flooding part of the Corps-owned island to reduce available nesting grounds for the rest. The plans were drawn up in response to a NOAA Fisheries biological opinion that called upon the corps to trim the cormorant colony to 5,939 or fewer breeding pairs in order to protect fish.

The cormorant colony on East Sand Island has grown from 100 breeding pairs in 1989 to some 15,000 in 2013. Their impact on salmon populations has also grown.

The corps estimates cormorants over that time have eaten about 11 million salmon and steelhead smolts yearly, or nearly 7 percent of juvenile steelhead that pass by East Sand Island on their way to the ocean.

The cormorants are responsible for as many salmon deaths as one Columbia River dam, corps spokeswoman Diana Fredlund said.

The culling solution was the corps' favored approach among several. Doing nothing at all, hazing birds and taking some of their eggs, and killing some birds while hazing the rest to get them off the island were also on the table. Fredlund said corps officials chose killing over hazing because they worried hazing would encourage birds to nest further upstream.

"It doesn't help the problem to shift it somewhere else," she said.

Those who oppose the culling argue it targets birds as scapegoats while ignoring the Columbia River dams' much larger impact on salmon and steelhead.

The corps has received more than 150,000 public comments on its draft plan, most of them in opposition. Fredlund said Friday's finalized version will contain some changes, but alluded culling would still be part of the plan.

Once the Friday's plan is released, the public will have 30 days to comment, after which the corps will issue a final record of decision and begin pursuing the plan. The agency must obtain permits from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service before it can hire workers to kill the animals - a process that isn't expected to encounter hurdles.

Agency officials hope to start culling by the time cormorant breeding season begins in the spring.

--Kelly House