The Attack of the Killer Rhododendrons (27 page)

Luis countered that “Glen” was not a real name and that I needed a proper one. By this he meant a Spanish name, and suggested “Guillermo,” which translates somehow as William. I tried to get Luis off my back by giving him a little ribbing in return. I pointed out that he was the only person at the table, and virtually the only person I had seen in Spain, with blue eyes. I tried to say it in a way that suggested that his parentage might be open to discussion.

The group began dispersing into the night in ones and twos just as Pepe showed up. I asked him if he had been banding Glossy
Ibis with the others, and he explained that he had real work to do. Hmmm. Despite the diminished group, it was impossible for me to keep up with a minimum of three people speaking at a time. Carmen was able to translate only three or four words before someone else demanded that she tell me something. It was usually Luis. Frequently, Carmen said that his comments couldn’t be translated into English, but said it in a way that suggested that what he was saying couldn’t be translated without using words that her priest would have objected to.

Pepe caught my eye and discreetly gestured at his watch, indicating that if I had questions for him I should try to get on with it by gently ignoring Luis. Pepe seemed like someone’s kindly grandfather with his pockets full of candies. He certainly did not come across as a heartless killer. He explained that at first there were many people opposed to the Ruddy Duck cull in Spain, including some biologists. He described fears in the early years of shooting hybrids in case they were, instead, pure White-headed Ducks. But Pepe and Chiqui had never got it wrong. Given this confidence, they now went with the familiar motto of “If in doubt, kill it!” Pepe told me about a trip to northern Spain where he had killed eleven Ruddy Ducks on a single pond. This was Basque country, and travelling around with a car full of guns was a dangerous proposition.

Carmen was called on to translate increasingly subtle concepts. Pepe explained that he had always been a hunter and had killed just about everything, but had long since traded in his gun for a camera, except when called upon by his position. Since he had shot more Ruddy Ducks than anyone else, I asked if he felt proud about his involvement, as I had been told others did. He said it was more a matter of completing a task; it was part of his job. Shooting a duck sitting on the water is difficult, and luck is often involved. For him it was a matter of mathematics, taking into account the wind, waves, and distance as the duck moved in three dimensions. Sometimes he killed the duck with his first shot and sometimes with the fifteenth. I asked if he, the expert, would go to England to kill Ruddy Ducks if asked. He said that he would go if told to by his boss.

Pepe told me that the man responsible for the release of Ruddy Ducks in Britain was Peter Scott. I finally had a name to go with the act, and when I started looking into Scott, was surprised that I hadn’t stumbled across him before. Scott had won an Olympic medal in yachting, and was a British gliding champion. Serving as a lieutenant commander in WWII, Scott had come away with an M.B.E. and a D.S.C. An early conservationist, he had founded the Wildfowl Trust and was chairman and one of the founders of the World Wildlife Fund. Scott was knighted in 1973 for his service to the environment.

It wasn’t all sunshine and light though. Somewhere around 1948, Scott imported three pair of Ruddy Ducks from North America to a reserve on the Severn estuary in England, where they commenced breeding. The plan was to trim the wing feathers of all the ducks to keep them from escaping. Could anyone possibly fail to see what would happen next? Because Ruddy Ducks are so good at avoiding capture, not all the young ducks had their wings clipped, and by 1952 or 1953 some had escaped. You know the rest.

Luis was clearly disappointed that he had lost his audience. He poked at me until I turned to face him and then asked if I spoke French. I said that I spoke
un peu.
He then demanded that I do so, so I launched into a sentence about my desire for an additional glass of white wine. He cut me off, insisted that I was doing it wrong, and used his own ten words of the language to attempt to construct a sentence. Very badly. He then went off on a tangent about all women being the same after the lights had gone off. I felt sorry for Carmen, as he insisted that she translate his vulgar opinions. I put away my notebook hoping that he would shut up if he saw that I was no longer writing.

It didn’t work. Luis claimed that he was insulted because he had not been contacted for an interview about Ruddy and White-headed ducks. He was also “pissed off” (I suspect Carmen of cleaning up the language) in general about people who claimed to know about these ducks when they didn’t go into the field to study them.

He was also “pissed off” because those I had spoken to were not, in his opinion, reliable sources of information. This all came as he blew cigarette smoke in my face. I was getting rather pissed off myself. As I sipped my wine, Luis jabbed his finger in front of my face, making point after point. I wanted to bite his finger, but feared nicotine poisoning. When Pepe got up to leave, Carmen and I took the opportunity to slip away.

After a late dinner, Carmen returned to her room, while I went for one more walk through the streets of El Rocío. I was trying to put in order all my thoughts of ducks and Spain. I was also trying to ward off homesickness. Then I stopped in front of the church of the Virgin of El Rocío. Despite the darkened skies above, House Martins were still foraging furiously for insects attracted to the cathedral’s bright lights illuminating the plaza. I realized that my Ruddy Duck story wasn’t quite complete.

T
HERE ARE TIMES
when I don’t want to know all sides of the story. Ignorance makes decisiveness so much easier. It was clear that I shouldn’t leave the story of the White-headed Duck without hearing more about the opposition to the Ruddy Duck cull in England.

I arrived at Ebenezer Hall in Tonbridge, Kent, in time for the appointment I had made months before, but had trouble convincing myself that I was in the right place. The address I had been given was for the Old Chapel in Bradford Street, and this was the only old chapel in the neighbourhood, but I couldn’t find a sign to confirm my destination. When I walked right up to the building, I found two windows that were discreetly etched with the words “Animal Aid,” but they weren’t visible unless I stood in exactly the right place. A much more obvious sign announced “Notice: Employees Only.” I tried the door and found it locked. I pushed a button and introduced myself to the ethereal voice at the other end. The voice buzzed me in.

Andrew Tyler was the director of Animal Aid, an agency dedicated to an end to animal abuse and the promotion of a cruelty-free lifestyle. Tyler wore a polo shirt over a T-shirt, and sported a small
earring. He greeted me into his office by saying he hadn’t been sure whether I would be coming. I checked my watch. “We said eleven o’clock on the 28th, right?” I asked. Perhaps he wasn’t sure whether I was serious about the whole thing. Tyler’s was a wonderful office, as cluttered as mine, and with the perfect admixture of professional paperwork and personal items.

As our discussion began, Tyler seemed on edge. The better part of his edginess might have been the result of his anxiety about a dog that was at the veterinarian for an eye operation; Tyler was waiting for the call about the outcome. Beyond this, I wasn’t sure—perhaps he was accustomed to being treated as something of a nutter, the director of an organization that some would say was full of nutters. I asked a couple of general questions to get us started. Tyler explained that fourteen people worked in the offices, but he didn’t introduce me to any of them. It may be the sort of place where names are not disclosed without a good reason.

I explained that I was interested in the nature of the opposition to the Ruddy Duck cull in Britain, having spoken to so many people in Spain who were heartily supportive. I leaned back in my chair, notepad and pencil ready, and let Tyler speak.

He told me about Tom Gullick, a leading English ornithologist living in Spain, who had first alerted the Spanish government to the plight of the White-headed Duck after doing surveys in about 1973. Initially Gullick was not opposed to the Ruddy Duck cull, but later came to think of it as a scandalous use of limited conservation funding and described it as a pointless and expensive massacre. I wasn’t familiar with a leading English ornithologist named Tom Gullick. I was familiar only with a Tom Gullick widely regarded as the world’s most eminent birdwatcher.

Tyler went on to express the opinion that too many people had now “stuck their necks too far above the parapet” to admit that they were wrong about the need to kill Ruddy Ducks to protect White-headed Ducks. He claimed that the White-headed Duck had become fetishized; the cull was no longer about saving the species but designed only to save reputations. Tyler suggested that conservation
issues like the White-headed Duck situation can lead to a feeling of impotence that can be circumvented, in part, by killing Ruddy Ducks. “It’s politics. It’s religion. It’s potency.” What we lacked, according to Tyler, was people with sufficient competence and wit to actually fix the problem. We constantly co-opt and reconstitute nature and wildlife with a desire to see the animals of our youth, even though we have so radically transformed the landscape that everything is out of balance.

Tyler claimed that the media in Britain had two types of stories when it came to Ruddy Ducks. The first was about the great cost involved in culling Ruddy Ducks. The second was about randy Ruddy Ducks seducing White-headed Ducks in Spain.

I was following the thread, but then Tyler seemed to fall off the tracks a bit. He claimed that at the heart of the Ruddy Duck cull was a desire to help a cherished species because it was threatened by a foreign species. We simply weren’t able to tolerate two species. “If they are close enough to hybridize, it doesn’t matter. It’s killing in the name of blood purity.” He used the word “fascistic” to describe the situation, and then told me to cross it out of my notes, which I did. But then he went on to use the word four times more, and I felt justified including it.

Tyler then spoke in general terms about the opposition of members of Animal Aid to actions of this sort. He said that those with even a basic understanding of the issues see an administration that supports and facilitates the killing of wildlife for profit. He cited the example of pheasants and partridge, which are produced in the tens of millions in the UK so that they can be shot. Native stoats, ferrets, foxes, and hedgehogs are considered “vermin” because they interfere with the production of game birds.

“So people in this country see a regime that supports agriculture over nature, and then they hear that we kill Ruddy Ducks on the nest because of a duck that they have never seen, whose numbers are reduced by hunting and habitat destruction.” I was starting to understand his visceral opposition to the cull.

“I find the whole business of genetic purity …” He let the sentence
trail off, and I think he felt he was getting too close to making an inflammatory parallel. Instead he took a different tack and made a particularly salient point. He explained that the British population of Ruddy Ducks had grown from a very small founding population. Unless all the Ruddy Ducks are eradicated in all European and African countries where they are currently found, then the eradication endeavour was pointless.

“Logistically it can’t be done,” said Tyler. “Morally it is vile, politically it is cynical, and the whole proposition is …”—Tyler paused to let me catch up and to collect his thoughts—”… an absurd and gross objective through killing. Eradicating the impure,” he said, “is foul, absurd, and doomed to failure.” I think that Tyler, and perhaps other members of Animal Aid, see animal rights activism as an extension of a grander social conscience. He spoke of how a culture can be completely intolerant of behaviours like kicking a dog, but comfortable with a state that subsidizes and supports vivisection and the mass production of farm animals.

I then asked Tyler an impossible question, and apologized for asking it. “If a button could be pressed, eliminating all Ruddy Ducks in Europe and Africa without causing any suffering, could you and other members of Animal Aid support the action?” Tyler stared at me, and I couldn’t tell if he was formulating an answer, or irritated at being asked a question without an answer. He prefaced his response by saying that it was something of a cop-out. He said that suffering
is
involved in the Ruddy Duck cull. Some people, himself included, feel that suffering is the bottom line. However, people need to face up to the consequences of greedy and stupid use of the world. On the other hand, one needs to be practical and pragmatic when dealing with animal issues. For Tyler, the bottom line is that the cull shouldn’t proceed; the cull is scapegoating. “If we want the benefits, let’s do it without the killing. We can still obsess about the White-headed Duck.”

I h
AD SET OUT TO HAVE A BIT OF FUN
with ducks. Instead I was left trying to juggle pieces of a subtle issue complicated by endless
technical aspects and charged with emotion. Was it even possible to summarize the story?

From 100,000 individuals a century ago, the White-headed Duck was on its way out, the result of galloping habitat destruction and unsustainable hunting. Although the species is by no means out of trouble yet, with continued declines in the global population and an “endangered” designation granted by the IUCN, significant progress has been made, particularly in Spain, where its numbers are increasing. It was absolutely wrong to bring Ruddy Ducks from North America to Britain, but the act was completed without malice and in a different age with different perspectives, and no one could have foreseen hybridization with White-headed Ducks in Spain. Ruddy Ducks came along at exactly the wrong time for the White-headed Duck. To anyone with a background in the biological sciences, there can be no doubt that the White-headed Duck is a distinct biological entity and worthy of preservation. Although the position is not incontestable, it seems that the genetic integrity of the White-headed Duck is threatened by Ruddy Ducks, although the ultimate extent of the threat is not currently knowable. The heart of White-headed Duck recovery efforts is currently in Spain, but the long-term future of the species also depends on efforts in other jurisdictions.