Ruddy Duck - when even your gut feeling isn't sure (June 3rd 2025)

Whenever I see a Ruddy Duck reported on social media or Bird Guides I probably go through the range of emotions of any person who has been birding since the mid 1990s: slight nostalgic amusement that such a (formerly) widespread bird should be twitched; sadness at the impact we have caused Ruddy Duck to have on White headed Duck in Spain; a tinge of (probably inappropriate) victorious-ness that some Ruddies have survived the cull; and a depressed realisation that the bird is likely to venture out of the nature reserve where it is protected and end up shot.  All in the context of knowing that, on balance, the cull was and is the right thing to do even if it wasn't always done the right way.

After reading the interesting piece by David Callahan in the May 2025 BirdWatch magazine (which is worth a read) I'm left torn about the story of the Ruddy Duck and the fact that any birds now get reported at all - almost certainly a death sentence for the individual.  It's a sad story of human introduction and then human terminal control, with so little understanding of the impact on a global scale, with a relatively happy ending (that White headed Ducks are recovering); and it's a happy story on an individual scale with probably a sad ending (that I got to see a now rare in the UK bird but that access will inevitably paint a target on the back of the duck).

After travelling with Lee, I watched the Ruddy Duck with all of this whirling in my mind.  The rain poured across the nature reserve, and I stood absorbed by nostalgia and the reminder of Ruddy Duck behaviour - the way they sit so low in the water, like a submarine mid-dive; the stubby tail and soft tones of the female; the size comparison against Mallard and Pochard and Little Grebe revealing just how small they are.  As a beginner birder in Bolton, Ruddy Duck were pretty much on every pond and reservoir in the area.  I remember Doffcocker Lodge (a small body of water in urban Bolton) had at least a dozen.  They are recorded in almost every trip list I can find from my teenage years, and I think I probably failed to appreciate the bold males with their luminous blue bills and clean white cheeks, and I definitely overlooked the subtle beauty of the female bird.  I remember not even looking when someone on one of the field trips said they'd seen a Ruddy on the water - sadly, in my callow youth, I had decided they were so widespread that they weren't worth a glance.  Now, some thirty years later, understanding all of the issues, I can't help but miss the characterful little ducks from my local pond.  The feeling I was left with while watching the female preen wasn't purely one thing or another, instead it was a sort of bittersweet delight to have caught up with an old friend in the middle of the whole tragic backstory.

That the problems caused by the introduction of Ruddy Ducks was so apparent even at a population density of only around 6000 birds in the UK shows the real harm that humans can do to the environment in which we live just by not knowing what impact our actions will have.  The average person understands so little of how our interconnected world works.  I am not a scientist and I am so aware that I have (relatively) little idea how our actions will affect things in 30, 50, 150 years, in much the same way as those duck-loving collectors had no clue what impact bringing Ruddy Duck from America would have.  There is a real need for the average person to understand environmental science to a much greater depth and yet it really isn't taught in any detail in schools.  It underpins some of the geography curriculum, where it is taught with (very) varying degrees of skill, but it is absent from almost the whole rest of the curriculum (with the exception of a mention in Personal Development curriculum which is often taught by non-experts ranging from English teachers to language specialists, to PE staff, to teaching assistants) from 11-16 years old as though only geographers should worry about environmental impacts.  

There is a desperate need for us to find, enable, fund, promote good science communication at the level an average person can understand.  This cannot have as its starting point the extremism of "you should never drive", or "everyone should be vegan", or the ultimately futile gesture demonstrations of some protest groups because that high bar for acceptance into a group idea will put off the vast majority of people, and end up pushing people back to a lazy mainstream that is so mired in ennui that they can't summon enough enthusiasm to act to save themselves from crushing climate change impacts today.  I'm not going to be able to solve this problem, especially on a blog with absolutely no influence in the wider world, but it seems obvious to me that we should be finding ways to teach the hard-learned lessons of the recent past so that we can stop our headlong rush into the very much bigger problems of the future.

One of the most important aspects of birding for me is how birds make me think.  The encounter with Ruddy Duck was good for two reasons: it challenged me to think about complex issues and global problems; and it was a joy to dwell for a time in nostalgic innocence, and see a bird I had long ago assumed I would never see again.