I got a call yesterday to tell me that there were ruddy ducks on the river in Ely.
I am not a twitcher - meaning that I don't chase rare birds - but this was enough to suggest a diversion to see them would be worthwhile.
Unfortunately, the story was only partly true. These are what I saw:
Those two rather pretty ducks look like ruddy shellducks to me, which are quite different to ruddy ducks.
Until a decade or so ago, we had a rising population of ruddy shellduck; all of them originally escaped from collections because these are Indian birds of origin that have not, as far as I know, ever made their own way here.
The trouble was that these escaped ducks all too easily hybridised without the native shellduck population and were thought to be a threat to it. They have, unlike other escapes, including Canada and greylag geese, been ruthlessly culled as a result.
I suspect that will be the fate of these two, which left me feeling a little sorry for them.
But it also made me worry that there are too many politicians who take the same attitude towards people in what they think to be the wrong place, and that left me very uncomfortable. How else would we end up with the callousness of the Rwanda policy and the Bibby Stockholm barge?
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To be honest, Bibby Stockholm and Rwanda are based on more shallow thinking than that of the ruddy shelduck problem.
But what is laughable is the seemingly useless COP28 and its effects on the habitats of these birds. Have they been secured? I think not. So we’ll save the ruddy duck so that we humans can make it extinct instead!!!!
I often think of our red squirrel which as a wee boy I used to see in the parks of my native Nottingham. It’s all grey squirrels now although our little red is making a comeback up north.
But your point I suppose is that there must be a better way than just culling? I agree. But we can’t even look after people properly in this damned country, never mind ruddy shell ducks.
I fear culling is probably appropriate in this case: the resident popuylation of shellduck might cease to exist without it
And culling is sometimes necessary with feral species
But they really are very nice ducks
There used to be a pub called the Ruddy Duck at Peakirk near Glinton.
I remember Peakirk Bird Sanctuary, which no longer exists. I wonder if they could have escaped from there. We used to go there quite often.
Is the Ruddy Duck still there?
I think the bird sanctuary has gone so I doubt they are the source
Many years ago there was an EU Blood Orange mountain.
This was also the time Ruddy Ducks started to appear and there was a call for a cull.
One wit suggest a compulsory dish on restaurant menus
Ruddy Duck a la Bloody Orange
🙂
Of all the bird flesh we are invited to eat, I find duck of any sort to be the most fowl.
Sorry……………..
I could not eat it now
Nor goose
I admit I still do chicken though
Having been vegetarian since the mid 70s, I think eating any bird is fowl, as is eating any other sort of meat.
Strange, though, how people still expect us to eat turkey at Christmas.
“What, not even at Christmas?” is the usual response.
I’ve not heard of a cull of ruddy shelducks but possibly this will explain
https://www.bto.org/understanding-birds/birdfacts/ruddy-duck
more power to your elbow
Dave
Thanks
I think the two birds in your picture are Cape Shelduck to the right, Ruddy Shelduck to the left. The former is found in southern Africa, the latter in south-east Europe eastwards, though with introduced populations in the Netherlands and Germany. Your birds are therefore mostly likely to be escapes from a collection somewhere not far away. The species being culled was something different, the Ruddy Duck, from North America, introduced/escaped in the UK, and an additional potential threat to the increasingly rare White-headed Duck native to Spain and further east. I hope this information is of interest and goes a little way to counterbalance the enormous amount of financial knowledge I have gained from your site.
I did caveat with an ‘I think’ becvauise I know my limits in this area.
What I did know is that they were not ruddy ducks
Thank you.
I once saw a Ruddy Duck on the pond in Pymmes Park in Edmonton, of all places. I couldn’t believe how blue its bill was; It looked like it was made of plastic.
Always strikes me that there is something a little ludicrous, (to say nothing of cruel and ignorant), about the practice of culling alien species because they might represent a threat to local species.
The success of some alien species is simply a manifestation of evolution. It is only in our absurd politico-geographical view of the world that the notion of a species as being alien has any meaning – from an ecological point of view, “alien” species are simply species that have been transported to a different point on the planet, most frequently by another species that is typified in many of its current habits by being a successful alien invader; our own species.
Culling the alien species to preserve other species amounts, in reality, to an attempt to regulate or prevent evolution.
Given time, nature would eventually establish a balance that accommodates the invasive aliens and it would do so in a way that would produce an altered natural environment considerably more balanced and functional than do our primitive, and usually unsuccessful and damaging, attempts at taking on the role of the blind watchmaker through the barrel of a gun.
And then, in the event that nature could not achieve that ecological balance in a benign and accommodating (to the alien species) way, because of non-mitigable characteristics of the alien species, then, it would, in due course, as it is doing with our own species, allow the species to drive itself into extinction to restore that balance.