§ Lord Gainfordasked Her Majesty's Government:
Whether they will list the organisations who are currently involved with the Ruddy Duck working group and what preliminary conclusions the group has reached.
§ The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Department of the Environment (Lord Strathclyde)The working group is drawing up a strategy to control the Ruddy Duck, an introduced species, which has spread from Britain to mainland Europe and is hybridising with and putting at risk the survival of the globally threatened White-headed Duck.
The working group is chaired by the Government's statutory scientific advisers, the Joint Nature Conservation Committee. The other organisations represented are the Department of the Environment, 66WA the Welsh Office, English Nature, the Countryside Council for Wales, Scottish Natural Heritage, the Wildfowl and Wetlands Trust, the International Council for Bird Preservation, the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds and the British Trust for Ornithology.
My department, in partnership with the Joint Nature Conservation Committee and the International Waterfowl and Wetlands Research Bureau, organised an international workshop at Arundel, Sussex on 1st and 2nd March of over 50 delegates from 10 countries. The workshop helped to foster mutual understanding about the scale of the problem and recognition that international cooperation was needed to tackle it. The agreed objective was to develop a strategy to stop and reverse the population and range expansion of Ruddy Duck in order to safeguard the White-headed Duck. Delegates were asked to take back to their countries recommendations for action in a number of areas, including legislation, monitoring, research, control measures, public relations and captive birds. The problems can only be resolved on the basis of mutual understanding and effort.
In Spain, the Ruddy Duck is undermining conservation efforts to save the White-headed Duck. I am very pleased to learn that the Spanish delegation at the workshop found the proceedings helpful and that they were encouraged by the positive action being taken in Britain to address the problem.