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."
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