by Glen Chilton
There was a time when Gibraltar was more English than England, but it seemed to me that the region was slowly being taken over by everyone else. The official currency in Gibraltar is pounds sterling, but every shop accepts euros. At the Ceremony of the Keys, the gentleman beside me had enthusiastically sung along to “God Save the Queen” but had done so in a thick Spanish accent. I had to wonder how long Gibraltar would remain a Crown colony of Great Britain, whether the apes remained or not.
On this uncertain rock lives a primate species whose own future is less than perfectly certain. Given its small and declining global population, and the anticipation of future declines, the Barbary macaque is considered endangered. In Gibraltar, officials are faced with the conflicting tasks of nurturing these threatened creatures, while killing some to keep their numbers in check.
The next morning, I refilled my backpack and walked north along Main Street, through the gates at Casemates Square, marched across the airport runway, and crossed the border into southern Spain in search of sexy ducks.
CHAPTER TEN
Duck Hunt at the OK Corral
REASON NUMBER TEN FOR INTRODUCING A FOREIGN SPECIES: BECAUSE THEY ARE SO GOSH-DARNED CUTE.
ON A SMALL LAKE, not so many kilometres from my former home in Canada, breed small ducks whose mating displays are so devilishly cute that they cause me to laugh. Although female Ruddy Ducks are not particularly resplendent, males have baby-blue bills and stiff tails that they point skyward while courting. This explains two of the rather less imaginative nicknames that hunters have for this species—stifftails and bluebills. When amorous, a drake Ruddy Duck bobs up and down in the water furiously, calling pita-pita-pita-pita-pita-peuuuuuu. Some trick of his breast feathers means that, while bobbing, the water around him erupts into a bubbly froth. This is apparently irresistible to females.
Ruddy Ducks have a wide breeding distribution in Canada and the United States, which is all well and good. The problem began about a half century ago when someone in England decided to import Ruddy Ducks. Nothing ever stays in captivity for long, and these ducks soon managed to establish a modest breeding population on the wrong side of the Atlantic. By itself, this wasn’t an issue. Ruddy Ducks in Britain didn’t compete with local waterfowl, didn’t eat anything endangered, and didn’t transmit nasty diseases. And, best of all, they are terribly, terribly cute.
If the Ruddy Duck had stayed put in England, there would have been no reason for concern, but in the 1960s a few Ruddy Ducks left the British Isles and flew to continental Europe. When they arrived in Spain, they caused a major problem for a closely related local bird. Numbers of the White-headed Duck, Malvasía Cabeciblanca, were in decline all over Europe as a result of overhunting and wetlands degradation, and they had earned endangered status. Just when things looked bleakest for the White-headed Duck, things got worse. For reasons best known to themselves, when given a choice of mating partners, White-headed Ducks are rather keen to breed with Ruddy Ducks, Malvasía Canela, and it was feared that the former species, already in crisis, might be exterminated as a unique biological entity through hybridization.
In an attempt to save the White-headed Duck, the call went out to kill any Ruddy Duck that had the audacity to show up in Spain; this was not a universally popular decision. Even more controversial was the move to attempt to wipe them out in England, the source of the immigrants. This was clearly a complex case, and I was in Spain to find out more.
CROSSING THE BORDER from Gibraltar into Spain proved to be a remarkably straightforward affair, a pleasant relief considering earlier tensions between the two regions. In 1965, General Franco closed the border, which was only fully reopened after his death and the entry of Spain into the European Common Market. At the frontier, a uniformed woman asked to see my passport but declined the opportunity to stamp it. Moments later, another woman asked if I had anything to declare and seemed disappointed that I didn’t. And that was pretty much that. I set down my pack, put on my hat to shade me from the blazing sun, and settled in to wait for Carmen Yuste, my Spanish guide and translator.
At the stroke of eleven, Carmen and her boyfriend, Cesar, pulled up in his grey Peugeot 205, but spotting me a moment too late, had to pull a U-turn and wait across the street for me. They were immediately pounced upon by the policía for stopping illegally, but they avoided a ticket by pointing out the hapless Canadian waving at them from across the boulevard. Because the Peugeot is a typical European car, there was no room in the trunk for my backpack, so it joined me in the back seat as we set off to pick up our rental car in Algeciras.
Like so many of his compatriots in southern Spain, Cesar spoke virtually no English, and as we drove, Carmen explained my adventures to him. He said something in Spanish, which Carmen translated as, “He says that you are like Indiana Jones.” Well, I have always thought so, only cuter. After securing the rental, Cesar set off for his home in Huelva, while Carmen and I went in search of ducks.
Carmen was a recent biology graduate seeking full-time employment, and was charming and full of smiles. I was told that I could address her in a number of ways, including Carmen, Carmen Sol (“Carmen Sun,” her family’s preference), and Carmen Soledad (“Carmen Solitude,” the preference of the priest who baptized her). As we drove, we discussed the difference between a nap and a siesta. It mainly came down to length: a siesta should be no longer than twenty minutes and is apparently far more rejuvenating than a nap. Carmen stopped just short of claiming that a nap was unhealthy.
We stopped for lunch in Nerja. This proved something of an issue, at least for the car’s windshield-mounted navigation system, which shouted at us in a female voice. Carmen had programmed in the address of our hotel in Almería, and as soon as we left the main highway, the device told us in no uncertain terms that we were to turn around and get back on track. She really was a pushy little creature, and did everything but call me an híbrido.
I was keen to refine my use of Spanish, and Carmen was more than pleased to correct me, politely but firmly, when I made an error of usage or pronunciation. For instance, I needed to be reminded to drop the letter “H” from words, turning Carmen’s home town of Huelva to “Well-va.” Although spelled “Córdoba,” a peculiar trick involving bs and vs meant that the city’s name is pronounced “Cordova.” Carmen said that I would not be incorrect in describing my beautiful wife with the expression “Lisa es muy linda,” but that it was really more of a Latin American expression. In Spain, I should say, “Lisa es muy guapa.” I learned that “guiri” is a less than fully flattering expression for a sunburned tourist from abroad. Carmen’s command of English was brilliant, but she did show some interesting peculiarities. Just as “Spain” was pronounced “Espain,” “school” became “eschool.”
We passed from the province of Cádiz to Málaga, through Granada, and on to the city of Almería and our hotel. After a two-hour nap for me and six 20-minute siestas for Carmen, we hit the streets, and Carmen explained the Spanish tradition of celebrating life late into the evening. In the following days, it became apparent that Carmen is one of the Mediterranean’s greatest supporters of this tradition.
We walked the waterfront and many back streets. We came across a Horse and Wine Festival, which seemed an awkward combination. We also found that the region’s wedding season was in full swing, and it can be no coincidence that Almería is pronounced almost exactly like “I’ll marry ya.” We spotted a bride being escorted to her reception, and a trio of women called out “¡Que se besen!” which I understand to mean “We want to see kissing!” Over dinner, we spotted a group of sixteen men sporting identical T-shirts. Each shirt had the caption “Se nos casa Pepe,” which to me suggested that Pepe had nowhere to live but according to Carmen meant “Pepe is getting married.” When I commented on how well behaved the stag-night revelers were, Carmen explained that it was because the night was so young. And sure enough, the next morning as I stood on my hotel room balcony, I spotted the same group of sixteen men, now staggerin
g and singing loudly: “Alcohol, alcohol, alcohol, alcohol, hemos venido a emborracharnos, el resultado nos da igual.” According to Carmen, this means: “Alcohol … we’ve come to get drunk, the result is the same for us.” A passing police car gave the group a wide berth.
FOR MY FIRST BIT of Ruddy Duck business, Carmen had arranged for us to meet Mariano Paracuellos at a small café in the vast and uncharted tracks of Almería province. Paracuellos works for a firm that monitors environmental issues in the region. He conducts research on wildlife, including a range of waterbirds, and collaborates with researchers at Universidad de Málaga. Finding him proved a bit tricky, because even though our navigation system accepted the café’s address as legitimate, she wasn’t quite sure how to get there. As long as we followed her directions she was happy, even when the directions were clearly wrong. If we went off in the more correct direction, she went into a sulk before giving us an alternative route in a rather intimidating voice. I told Carmen that I was coming to think of the navigation device as “Audrey.” “After Audrey Hepburn? Oh, that’s nice,” she said. Actually, I was thinking of Audrey II in Little Shop of Horrors.
Paracuellos deserves double nice-guy points. He had a newborn daughter at home, but on the Sunday morning that we met, he was still pleased to give up several hours of his day off. When we arrived at the café, a bit late thanks to Audrey, we found that Paracuellos had been nursing a hot drink that looked like chocolate mousse. Carmen ordered tea and a toasted baguette, and I had a small pastry and a blow-the-top-off-your-head coffee in a demitasse cup.
I immediately liked Paracuellos. He sported long sideburns and bits and pieces of a goatee. He wore a pendant that looked like the tail of a whale but probably represented some sort of plant leaf. Each of my five-cent questions received a two-dollar response from Paracuellos. Carmen, working hard to keep up, was able to give me a thirty-cent translation. Paracuellos was particularly erudite when it came to White-headed Ducks, about which he seemed very passionate.
The three of us set off in our rental car, and I got my first impression of just how convoluted the situation was for the poor old White-headed Duck. We parked on a little hillside overlooking a number of small lakes where the ducks bred. When the area was colonized by Phoenicians, the region had been an estuary, but human activities closed the region off from the sea and the habitat became a series of small lakes. One of these lakes was known to pirates in the sixteenth century.
The view for me was very different from what would have greeted the pirates. Paracuellos described the lakes as “water islands in a sea of plastic.” All around the lakes stretching as far as I could see were clear plastic greenhouse tents used to grow exotic fruits and vegetables. These plasticos even ranged up the hillsides where, I was told, they are illegal. They pushed right up to the margins of each lake, their distribution relieved only by access roads between them. Paracuellos explained that the plasticos of Almería can be seen by astronauts in orbit. Plasticultura interests in the area are keen to employ cheap African labour, but it is difficult for the companies to get contracts from the Spanish government to employ them legally, making the social situation all the more difficult for illegal immigrants. Racism haunts the region.
Along with the sea of plastic greenhouse tents come problems that are often associated with intensive agriculture, including the runoff of pesticides, herbicides, and fertilizer into the lakes used by White-headed Ducks and other wildlife. Rats are attracted by the agricultural produce, but also eat the eggs of birds. To further the ecological destruction of these lakes, mosquitofish, one of the most horribly invasive species in the world, had been introduced. They could be eliminated by poisoning the lakes, but that would wipe out everything else, including some endemic, globally threatened species.
Despite all of this degradation and destruction, these small lakes are among the most productive White-headed Duck habitat anywhere. A moderate excess of nutrients stimulates algal and plant growth, which increases the abundance of chironomid flies on which the ducks feed. The lakes are important, but they aren’t big; I could probably kayak across each of them in about ten seconds.
Paracuellos described White-headed Ducks as “silly.” In the presence of a male Ruddy Duck, White-headed drakes fly away, leaving all of the females for the invaders. Although it was just his impression, Paracuellos felt that the arrival of Ruddy Ducks in Spain coincided with bad weather in other parts of Europe. A nasty storm in England could drive Ruddy Ducks to more clement Spain.
Paracuellos took the wheel to drive us to a number of nature reserves. He spoke to us about the environment with such passion that we cruised along at 80 kilometres per hour in a 120 zone, much to the displeasure of other motorists. At our first reserve, we looked down upon wetlands rich in Cattle Egrets and Greater Flamingos. The geography would have been familiar to the Romans, but human activity was profoundly altering operation of the local environment. At one time, the region would have been flooded only seasonally. Now, a lot of the water piped in for plasticultura finds its way into the wetlands, which are now deeper, less salty, and more polluted. This is bad for most wildlife but, paradoxically, suits the needs of White-headed Ducks.
At another nature reserve, we found brackish marshes separated from the Mediterranean by sand dunes. We spied stilts, avocets, egrets, flamingos, ibis, and the globally vulnerable Marbled Teal, which was breeding at the reserve. We also spotted feral dogs that are shot to protect the wildlife. We passed a spot where a female Ruddy Duck had been shot the week before. I was told that this isn’t an easy thing to do. The vegetation is tall, and a duck can evade pursuers for a day or more. Ruddy Ducks can dive for a prolonged period and are safe from guns as long as they remain near White-headed Ducks.
We stopped at a marsh for my first close-up look at White-headed Ducks. An adult female was foraging near a car full of people who were tossing bits of bread out the windows; they probably didn’t appreciate it when we leapt from our car and strolled up to the edge of the marsh. Two White-headed Duck drakes swam further out in the marsh, along with Mallards, Moorhen, Coots, and Crested Pochard.
White-headed Ducks expect three things from their habitat: they need water of just the right depth; they need brackish (slightly salty) water; and they need a belt of the right sort of vegetation, such as cattails. These conditions were apparently just right for a portion of the gay community as well; this bit of wetland was a well-known meeting place, and the general litter of candy bar wrappers and water bottles was supplemented by used condoms.
We finished our tour at a wetland that had sprung up by accident when sand excavation for agricultural use had created a pit that gradually filled with water from an underground aquifer, creating a reasonably large marshy lake. With no warning, Paracuellos stopped the car abruptly, but resisted the temptation to leap out and disturb the event in front of us. Six adult male White-headed Ducks were displaying vigorously to an equal number of females. It was a beautiful courtship. We slipped quietly out of the car, although we could probably have been accompanied by a Dixieland jazz band for all the attention we got from the ducks. Each displaying male sat low in the water and made a whirring noise. Facing the hen at an angle, the drake quickly twisted his body to face her from another angle. I was astonished to find that the display of a male White-headed Duck was completely unlike the displays of male Ruddy Ducks in Canada. I cannot imagine how they ever manage to attract each other.
Carmen and I set off for the seaside resort of Alicante on the Costa Blanca.
SPANISH GENEROSITY of time and spirit continued. At nine o’clock on Monday morning, we were met by José Luis Echevarrias. We followed him to a neighbourhood that is very popular for purchase by foreign visitors keen on warm winters and a less hectic pace of life. We breakfasted at a café as we began our discussion of ducks in the El Hondo wetlands.
El Hondo is the region that most Spaniards first think of when the topic of wetlands comes up. Echevarrias explained that until the 1990s, White
-headed Ducks did not breed at El Hondo, but when they did arrive, Ruddy Ducks arrived as well. Years ago, the region’s natural areas were not specifically protected, but the plight of White-headed Ducks made the region a conservation priority.
When the presence of Ruddy Ducks was brought to the attention of the local administration, the decision was made to kill them.
When White-headed Duck hunting was banned in Spain and efforts were made to protect their breeding habitat, their numbers started to increase. A survey in 2000 revealed 4,000 individuals. But there was some reason to doubt the resulting optimism. There was a drought at the time, but the El Hondo wetlands persisted because they did not rely entirely on rain; ducks may have moved to the region from drier areas, with no real overall increase in numbers.
Throughout Europe, wetlands are in danger, and one of the greatest threats is the encroachment of urban development and agriculture. In the El Hondo region, the government decided to take a greater responsibility for conservation, and a significant number of ecologically important areas were protected. Since then, EU regulations have resulted in the protection of even more spots.
