It's been a dozen years since the federal government moved thousands of black-capped squawking seabirds here to reduce their diet of endangered fish.

Things haven't exactly gone as planned.

The hope in relocating the world's largest colony of Caspian terns to this sandy mound near the river's mouth was that they'd eat more sardines and herring - and fewer young salmon and steelhead. And they have.

But the move came at a price. This year the birds' summer retreat was transformed into a place of violence. A strange chain reaction involving divebombing eagles and marauding gulls kept this colony from producing a single chick.

Yet even with this bizarre turn the actual number of threatened fish slurped by birds is higher now than it's ever been. That's because this same desolate scratch of ground in recent years has also become home to the West Coast's largest gathering of double-crested cormorants.

Now this small city of gangly, avian beasts swallows far more salmon than terns ever did.

"It's alarming. They're eating our lunch, basically," said Gary Fredricks, a National Marine Fisheries Service biologist. "As we try to save more fish, they're eating more and we're not getting ahead."

Critics maintain, as they once did about terns, that fish-eating birds are a distraction from what really ails Columbia fish stocks - troubled fish habitat and hatcheries, hydropower dams and fishing.