DUCK SECRET REVEALED Spanish white-heads 'impure' --RSPB l..

http://www.animalaid.org.uk/news/2003/0307rudd.htm

News bulletin: July 2003

DUCK SECRET REVEALED
Spanish white-heads 'impure'
A major report has shot holes in the government's supposed
justification for its planned extermination of Britain's 6,000 ruddy
ducks. The following article from The Times, 19 July 2003, by Spanish
correspondent David Sharrock, reveals that the bird expert who
triggered the campaign to save the white-headed duck regards what he
calls the 'massacre' of ruddys as wrong and pointless.

An Englishman in La Mancha wishes to reveal one of conservation's most
closely guarded secrets. This is where the War of the Ruddy Duck began
and Tom Gullick, the world's greatest living birdwatcher, has decided
to reveal his undercover role in a tale of two birds.

Neither the Spanish nor our Government will wish to hear it. Both
countries are committed to spending millions to eradicate the ruddy
duck - whose only crime is to be American, over-sexed and over here -
to protect its close cousin, Spain's white-headed duck.

So angered is he by what he calls "this massacre" that Mr Gullick,
revered in the birding world for having spotted 8,250 species out of
the world total of 9,600 - has told The Times that the Spanish
white-headed duck is in fact Pakistani.

And he should know, because it was he who introduced it into Spain
when the indigenous white-headed population was just one more winter's
hunting season away from extinction.

"I'm quite certain that if we hadn't taken that action there wouldn't
be any left today," he said at his country cottage, set amid hunting
land that has changed little since the days of Don Quixote.

Mr Gullick, 72, is careful when telling his extraordinary story to
protect the identities of his accomplices and the precise details and
locations of how and from where the duck eggs were smuggled into
Spain. He will admit only that the origin of the eggs was Pakistan.
But his purpose, he makes clear, is to put an end to what he sees as
the official obsession with "hybridisation" - the mating of two
distinct species. "Genetic purity, it's a sort of bug that some
biologists have in their head," he said. "They would rather have no
white-headed ducks at all than some 'impure' ones coming from abroad."

It is now more than 20 years too late to be worrying about impurity
since, by his own calculations, the more than 3,000 white-headed ducks
thriving in Spain are the descendants of just 19 pairs, nearly half of
which came from Asia.

Mr Gullick's involvement began in the late 1970s, when he counted just
23 whiteheaded ducks - a quarter of the official Spanish estimate - at
a lake south of Córdoba. "Hunters were shooting the ducks and I
reckoned that with one more winter that would have been the end of the
Western European population of the white-headed."

He tried to enlist official support, but eventually took matters into
his own hands. "I decided to rent the right to shoot the land and put
in a guard as a keeper to look after it. Then, through some locally
agreed deals, there was no more shooting there."

Given the dangerously low numbers, Mr Gullick and his collaborators
decided "to have an insurance policy. We talked it over and decided
the thing to do was to get some eggs and hatch them out in case it all
went wrong. So we did that quite near here."

Eventually the 16 ducklings were introduced into the Doñana National
Park. Curiously, white-headed ducks are now regularly seen in La
Mancha, an area where they never lived and bred before.

Mr Gullick believes that, if anything, competition from the arrival of
the ruddy duck encouraged the white-headed to breed. "The decline of
the white-headed duck was caused by the drainage of wetlands and
shooting what was left. The ruddy duck came later, it has nothing to
do with the decline of the white-headed - if anything it's quite the
opposite.

"To go ahead with a cull originally might have been a gamble, but to
do it now is pointless. The white-headed is doing extremely well.
There has been an explosion of the population like never before in its
history.

"Nobody has explained why, but it's just possible that the
introduction of competition has spurred them on. The bigger the
population, the less hybridisation occurs."

Several hundred miles south of Mr Gullick's home is the office of José
Antonio Torres Esquivia, the champion of the white-headed duck. At any
moment of the day his phone might ring with news of a sighting of a
ruddy duck in Spain. At once, a well-rehearsed operation swings into
action. Señor Torres contacts the nearest of four teams that he has
across the country.

"When someone detects a strange duck, they call me. I alert the
nearest team and they go and kill it. In case of doubt they are under
instructions to shoot. Since there are now 3,000 white-headed ducks,
it wouldn't make much difference if one was shot by mistake, but in
any case it hasn't happened so far." Since 1984, some 122 ruddy ducks
have been shot, as well as another 58 hybrids in an operation that
costs £160,000 a year to run.

That works out at nearly £1,000 a bird. A similar average bounty has
been expended for the 2,651 ruddy ducks shot dead in Britain during
the Government's three-year trial. Opponents have observed that it
would be cheaper to fly each duck in Virgin business class to New
York.

Señor Torres is passionate about the white-headed, calling it "the
good one" and the ruddy "the bad one - it's much uglier" - when he
compares photographs of the two birds.

"A Herculean effort was made to save it and just when we thought we
had succeeded we started getting the invading species, which, when it
mates with our duck, produces a strange creature, a mixed race. Even
though some people in Britain think so, we are not savages. We employ
elite riflemen. Last month I saw for the first time one being shot and
it was very disagreeable. But there is no other way.

"Until all the ruddy ducks have been culled, the white-headed will not
be safe. It's like when the doctor says that you have to lose an arm
to save your life. And I think that the English scientists and
authorities understand this very well."

Andrew Tyler, of the pressure group Animal Aid, counters that "the
whole thing is stomach-churning. This is the first attempt at an avian
extermination programme. Talk about genetic impurity is racist. This
is simply what happens in nature; it's a natural survival mechanism.
The scheme is hugely unpopular and when wildlife preservation groups
and landowners refuse to co-operate you are going to see government
killing gangs forcing themselves on to land."

Back in La Mancha, Mr Gullick, who runs birdwatching tours, pleads for
a rethink on the decision to kill off the ruddy duck. "There is
absolutely no need for it and, in any case, they will never succeed in
its total eradication. It's a scandalous misuse of rare conservation
money.

"But I think too many people have stuck their necks too far up above
the parapet to admit that they are wrong."



Please write to the Minister for Nature Conservation and Fisheries,
making the points raised in the article and calling for a reprieve for
the ruddy duck. Write to:
Ben Bradshaw MP
Minister for Nature Conservation and Fisheries
Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs
Nobel House
17 Smith Square
London SW1P 3JR


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So, you dont like reasoned,
well thought out, civil debate?

I understand.

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