The Lincolnshire Bird Club

Wow, I'm staggered by this landslide dogmatic victory against sensible conservation policy, I missed my chance to vote but mine would have been an emphatic yes for reasons that I've outlined on here (and elsewhere) more times than I care to remember. If we are really down to 120 then the whole campaign (like it or not) is on the cusp of success. Why would anyone want to shelter these last individuals to jeopadise it? If it fails then sometime in the future a new one will start and a load of Ruddy Ducks and non-targets will be shot again.



Ian, try reading the numerous papers in peer-reviewed journals by various different independent research groups on the rational for the cull. The case was VERY well proven. As to threat, well read this:

http://digital.csic.es/bitstream/10261/ ... 0Spain.pdf




I'm sure I've harped on about this before but consider what the impacts on populations of meso-predators (Foxes, corvids etc) are of us 'supplying' them with millions of roadkill pheasants every year. This 'meso-predator' release sponsors 'hyper-predation' on passerines and small mammals - you end up with way more foxes, corvids etc than the landscape could naturaly support and they then exert massive predation pressure on songbirds. This all not helped by the fact that we removed the chief native predators of foxes (wolves) and corvids (Goshawks [ahhh did I mention Goshawks...])....



I strongly disagree, conservation in Britain isn't about putting a fence around something and stepping back, you do that in our landscape its game over for many species. We are so far from balance that the only way to maintain populations of rare species is by removing common ones. Wardens do that by trapping corvids, mink, removing bracken and other invasive plant species. Without a natural ecosystem replete with megaherbivores and top predators you have no hope without intervention. Time and time again introduced species have been highlighted as one of the greatest threats to insular biodiversity, our island is no different from the rest.



I'm very saddened to read this.



Still more so this.

1) there are no proven movements of Ruddy Ducks between Europe and North America, even the vagrants to Iceland were proven to be of North American origin. Eradication efforts in other European countries are ongoing despite the assertions of various rumour-mongers on the internet.

2) google search 'extinction by introgression', Mallards are doing a good job with this in many parts of the world, with endemic island ducks being swamped by introduced Mallards. Is that a good thing?

here's a good place to start:

http://www.montana.edu/wwwbi/staff/cree ... allend.pdf

If you accept that the science is solid (which it is) and that the cull is feasible (which it is on the cusp of success) then why are people against it? 'Sheltering' the last individuals and then calling the cull 'impossible' to implement is beyond belief. It will work if we want it to. Yes Ruddy Ducks are pretty to look at, yes shooting birds isn't nice, yes 'collateral damage' to other waterbirds is bad sh*t, but step back and think for a minute.

This from Seehausen 2006: http://ac.els-cdn.com/S0960982206014138 ... 150a538b58



Alex

_________________
Dr Alexander C. Lees
Lecturer in tropical ecology
Manchester Metropolitan University

Lab Associate
Cornell Lab of Ornithology,
Cornell University

http://www.freewebs.com/alexlees/index.htm
@Alexander_Lees

If you can't beat them, join them!! Having just watched the Grand National I bet 6-4 on that a topic which lay dormant for a week will suddenly spring into life again. Well said, Alex

alex wrote time and time again introduced alien species threaten our biodiversity !!! where does pheasant and red leg partridge fit into this grand plan, are some more alien than others, you may be a very clever man dr lees but it does not make you correct. talking down to the great unwashed, you are entitled to your opinion but beware PUBLIC FUNDED bodies who fly in the face of public opinion. all dictatorships are born because of the surety that they are correct and everyone else is wrong, oh by the way stuart were they silly little smiley things i spotted on your posting well well !!

terry whalin

Pheasant = massive problem in my opinion, however Pheasants = mega bucks, so nothing likely to come of that. Similarly there is evidence for competition of Red-legged Partridges with Grey Partridges and exchange of parasites that may locally threaten Grey populations cf: http://www.jstor.org/discover/10.2307/3 ... 6038061413

Some species introductions are benigner than others, but in virtually every case you introduce an organism you get an effect. Its pretty obvious really, add an extra species and something must give, that translate into declines and/or extinctions. Its just the effect size we're interested in. Nobody goes around advocating a cull of Little Owls, but those things have caused serious problems on Welsh seabird islands eating Storm Petrels.

In the case of the effect size of Ruddy Duck we are looking at the potential for global extinction of White-headed Duck. That's the biggest effect possible. It was our fault, we were obliged to fix the problem.

Its not always simple - here's my undergrad thesis:

http://www.freewebs.com/alexlees/Lees%2 ... 202008.pdf

_________________
Dr Alexander C. Lees
Lecturer in tropical ecology
Manchester Metropolitan University

Lab Associate
Cornell Lab of Ornithology,
Cornell University

http://www.freewebs.com/alexlees/index.htm
@Alexander_Lees

alex at least we agree about something, its about money that shooting provides and our native wildlife are sacrificed on that sacred alter and that puts pheasant and red leg partridge as not so alien as others. i say again no eradication of the ruddy duck. the reason for this is white headed duck i have seen in england in 40 years birding and conservation work is 4 and some of them of suspect origin. if europe have a problem let them deal with it not our publically funded bodies. the europeans do such things with a relish and it will take their mind of turtle doves honey buzzards etc. just the image of defras taxpayer funded gunmen at our nature reserves funded by public subscription sends out all the wrong messages. the megaphone foot in the mouth communications have failed to take the public with them and that has been followed by low profile sitting on hands policy. surely there has to be a better way in the conservation system to spend the money than on in my opinion a stupid policy which could put the efforts of conservation back years with people just not subscribing any more with falling revenue. i know people quite high up inside various conservation bodies who secretly advocate a no report policy, that is the first sign of a growing anger and resistance that the people who make such decisions to cull would do well to take note of. no offence mean't with any comments in my postings but i am passionate about a no kill policy. no objection of killing for food its just the slaughter for fun or sport i cannot get my head round it it the same and no better than badger baiting.

terry whalin

Most of us, I am sure, had believed that the subject of the Ruddy Duck cull had been put to bed with the announcement of the result of our poll but now, some two weeks later, it has been resurrected.

Sorry, Alex, but since when has it been standard practice to miss voting in a poll (for whatever reason) and then proceed publicly to question, analyse and even denigrate the opinions of members of the winning faction ? A poll is a poll and for better or worse we are accustomed to accepting the majority decision without further (public) comment.

Anyway, that 'faux pas' apart, further questions have now been raised and they merit comment.

Perhaps some might be missing a vital non-academic point here in our poll : we, the winning majority voters in the poll, were not necessarily voting against a cull of the Ruddy Duck per se; we were voting against THE cull of the Ruddy Duck in the UK. In other words, if eg. the Spanish wish to cull the bird in Spain, then let them go ahead.....and that action would probably arouse little opposition in the UK. (The fact of the EC Directive was known to all voters). Yes, illogical as it may appear to some, the message is clear and the clarity of the message as conveyed is : "Hands off OUR Ruddy Ducks !"

Further, taking into account points raised, and after sifting through many of the more accessible web reports, the following really do need clarifying :

1. Is there any cast-iron proof that the production of Spanish hybrids involved UK Ruddy Ducks ? Is there any reason why the hybridisation wasn't/isn't wholly the result of mating by Ruddy Ducks from Spain itself or of birds flying in eg. from Portugal ?

2. Have there been any significant numbers of ringed recoveries of UK Ruddy Ducks in southern Spain ?....independently verified.

3. As no mention was made of the enormous sum of £5 million required to carry out an effective cull, may we assume that's all right then ?

Finally, and to emphasise Terry's subsumed point about academia's eternal battle to convince a doubting non-academic public that they alone hold the answer-key to the world's all-important questions with the one and only correct answer, plus academia's self-confessed inability to comprehend the thought processes and actions of people whose minds are "untrained"......well, (and I stress NOT applicable in the case of contributing members to this current LBC thread) in general, academia may win the intellectual argument but what the "untrained" minds call basic common sense and pragmatism can be in short supply.......ivory towers and all that : hence the comprehension gap.

Freddy

Alex says that there are no proven movements of Ruddy Duck from North America to Europe then says that the Iceland birds were proven to be of North American origin.
I thought that Iceland is considered to be part of Europe? and not that far from Scotland.
Having read his assertions I still disagree with the cull.
Geoff

Hi Terry



Indeed, totally agree. I also hate, but grudgingly agree that it may be true, the suggestion that landowners might destroy what remnants of semi-wild Britain remains if shooting were banned. But do the landed gentry really want to turn the whole country to a lifeless arable field.



The problem here is our 'moral obligation to right the wrong that we (the WWT) committed. We made the mistake, we pay. I agree that it would be great if someone else would pay, or indeed if we could funnel some of the gun-toting Europeans into doing the service for us for free, but that seems unlikely. I don't understand what you seeing some vagrant/escape WHDs has anything to do with the debate though?

Hi Freddy



Well, apologies for my absence, I was in an Amazonian red-list priority setting meeting in southern Brazil! However I do feel (very) strongly about the issue so am moved to comment...



Just because you have a majority doesn't mean the issue is settled, moreover it doesn't mean the rationale is wrong. Opinion polls in the states, the most technologically advanced and richest country in the world consistently show that over half of the population believes the world to be less than 6000 years old. In taking a poll on an emotive issue like this you are more likely to get replies from people who feel strongly about the subject, the vast majority of people using the forum did not respond = 78%. I'm not going to second guess the silent majority's opinion but who is to say that you might have not got a big swing the other way?

What would happen if you polled 100 members of conservation NGOs, or 100 animal rights activists? 100 members of the BTO, RSPB, RSPCA, BOU or BES?. You will get very big differences of opinion and I would argue that those differences in opinion from pro to anti will also correlate very strongly with knowledge about the issue.



I don't get this at all. 'Our' Ruddy Ducks? Do you feel strongly about 'our' Mink, Grey Squirrels, Muntjac, Canada Geese? All those species are causing ecological crises in the UK. More to the point, there is no 'our' and 'their' in population terms, it is the same population - derived from the same stock. Its not just Spain we are worrying about either - Ruddies could easily threaten the eastern European/Russian stock where recent vagrants have been reported.



See below... its the same birds!



I don't think there are any UK-Spain ringing recoveries, after all there aren't that many Ruddy Ducks ringed in the UK. There is however genetic proof that the Spanish birds had a UK origin - see:
http://digital.csic.es/bitstream/10261/ ... uction.pdf

Basically, the population was founded by a small number of individuals so the European population has low genetic diversity - all being descendents of the WWT population. There isn't any proof that any of our vagrant American passerines comes from America either, but then I'm willing to bet they do.



5 million is actually quite cheap, the Coypu eradication cost about the same back in the 1980s (spread over 11 years). Non-native species across the board have been estimated to cost the UK economy £1.7 billion annually.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-11996801
http://www.defra.gov.uk/wildlife-pets/non-native/



I'd sooner let a bunch of conservation biologists decide conservation policy than I would any other group of people.

I think its good to debate this issue, and am happy to be convinced its a bad idea if someone can demonstrably prove this to be the case. But bear in mind that this cull is on the cusp of success (if DEFRA's figure are accurate), I advise people 'holding back' to think long and hard on their motives.

Alex

_________________
Dr Alexander C. Lees
Lecturer in tropical ecology
Manchester Metropolitan University

Lab Associate
Cornell Lab of Ornithology,
Cornell University

http://www.freewebs.com/alexlees/index.htm
@Alexander_Lees

Sorry, I meant 'European' origin! FYI they have apparently had problems there between Slav Grebes and Ruddies, no crazy hybrids obviously but competition for nest sites...

http://digital.csic.es/bitstream/10261/ ... uction.pdf

_________________
Dr Alexander C. Lees
Lecturer in tropical ecology
Manchester Metropolitan University

Lab Associate
Cornell Lab of Ornithology,
Cornell University

http://www.freewebs.com/alexlees/index.htm
@Alexander_Lees

Alex,

Thank you for your prompt and detailed answers to my questions.

I have just a few follow-up points :

a. £5 million may be 'quite cheap' but you add that across the board non-native species have been estimated to cost the UK economy £1.7 billion annually. Do you also have the figure that the non-native Ruddy Duck cost the UK economy in any one year before the cull was instituted ?

b.You seem to agree that there are no UK-Spain ringing recoveries of the Ruddy Duck. (I am sure you would know chapter and verse if there were.)

c. Given the very small unreadable print and the inordinate length of the quoted article, I would ask :
As all European Ruddy Ducks are descendents of the escaped Slimbridge WWT population, and given that less than 40 years elapsed between the initial escape from captivity and the start of the cull (1960-1999), are we now being told that BEFORE the cull started scientists had irrefutable PROOF that genetic differences could already be traced not only in the different European populations (eg.UK Ruddy Ducks as opposed to Spanish Ruddy Ducks) but also in the hybrid offspring ?

d. As for American passerines not coming from America........well, they'd hardly come from the Middle East or Africa, would they ?

Finally, there appears to be a fair amount of circumstantial ( so-called scientific) evidence surrounding the original reasons for the cull and I am still not convinced, bearing in mind :

a. NO UK ringing recoveries
b. potentially dodgy genetic 'evidence'

that 12 jurors (perhaps ALL with academically "untrained" minds and none being trained lawyers.....but that's our well-tried and trusted system) would have found the Ruddy Duck guilty as charged.

Freddy

Hi Freddy




Not a penny I doubt. But that wasn't my point in illustrating this statistic. My point is that invasive species cause big problems, some of them have an economic cost, some don't. I'm proud that the goverment were prepared to pay for a conservation intervention the sole goal of which was conservation.



I couldn't find anything whacking the search terms 'ringing recovery', 'UK', 'Spain' and 'Ruddy Duck' into google scholar. The molecular result is however irrefutable proof of a UK origin. This shouldn't really come as a surprise given that the Iberian 'populations' became established after the UK population boomed and after colonisation of France (= Occam's razor).



Yes, the article compares birds from US populations to birds from UK & European populations! The UK population
was originally founded by less than a dozen individuals, so all their descendents have a very restricted gene pool, birds shot all across Europe have a very similar genetic makeup.



This being my point, Ruddy Ducks in Iberia are more likely (even without the molecular proof) to have come from an expanding UK/Northern European population. Before Ruddy Ducks were introduced to the UK there were NO records of Ruddy Duck from Europe. Since then there have been lots. The only candidate for a genuine vagrant is a single on the Azores and considering the shock that everyone got that the Iceland birds were of feral stock then its quite probable that this bird was too. In comparison compare this figure of 0 or 1 with the numbers of vagrant North American waterfowl of other species, none of which have colonised Europe in recent history. Absence of a ringing recovery just means we didn't ring enough Ruddy Ducks. Or it means that it was Ruddy Ducks with UK grandparents living in France that were the direct descendents of the Spanish ones...



Clutching at straws there Freddy. Do you want to explain your alternative hypotheses to me or anyone else who's listening?

cheers

Alex

_________________
Dr Alexander C. Lees
Lecturer in tropical ecology
Manchester Metropolitan University

Lab Associate
Cornell Lab of Ornithology,
Cornell University

http://www.freewebs.com/alexlees/index.htm
@Alexander_Lees

Anyone with time on their hands might want to read this thread on Surfbirds:

http://www.surfbirds.com/forum/showthread.php?6141

_________________
Dr Alexander C. Lees
Lecturer in tropical ecology
Manchester Metropolitan University

Lab Associate
Cornell Lab of Ornithology,
Cornell University

http://www.freewebs.com/alexlees/index.htm
@Alexander_Lees

I don't know about anyone else 'listening', Alex. I think we may be the only two still awake.

Perhaps we can agree to differ and bid each other "Good-night" ! or "Boa noite" !

Regards,

Freddy

I for one am still listening; it’s nice to have an intelligent view from a qualified scientist for a change.

_________________
www.nickclayton.net
www.nickclayton.co.uk

para você também Freddy! Its only 1700 here though!

_________________
Dr Alexander C. Lees
Lecturer in tropical ecology
Manchester Metropolitan University

Lab Associate
Cornell Lab of Ornithology,
Cornell University

http://www.freewebs.com/alexlees/index.htm
@Alexander_Lees