Eiders in Trouble

After seeing packs of female eiders swimming along without young when each one should have been followed by a brood, we were getting depressed. Productivity in Maine eiders is extremely low, while productivity in Maine gulls is extremely high. The predatory gulls are heavily subsidized by lobster fishing and fast-food dumpsters. Nobody’s subsidizing the eiders. They’ve got to deal with more gulls than they’ve ever battled, and they’re essentially defenseless. What's a duck going to do when a great black-backed gull drops out of the sky and snatches her duckling? In an email today, Scott Weidensaul told me that the female eiders stick together and form a creche with their young. He wrote, " Sara Morris, in her years out on Appledore Island, once saw two hen eiders reach up at an attacking gull, each grab a wing, and slam the gull into the water like a stone, almost killing it." And yet even this spirited defense has little efficacy against so many gulls. A common eider productivity study by Kim Mawhinney in 1995 in the Bay of Fundy had 3000 ducklings hatched. Twelve of them made it to fledging age. Nearly all the rest went down the capacious gullets of gulls. Does that sound sustainable to you? Strenuous gull nest control efforts in 1996, including oiling gull eggs to prevent hatching, resulted in no decline in gull predation on the eiders: eight eider ducklings in the same population survived to fledge in 1996.

Finally, as we left Monhegan Island, we saw a couple of hen eider with young. Not many, but some. It’s interesting to watch the females when they’re swimming with flightless young. Normally, they’d fly when pressed by an approaching vessel. When they’ve got flightless ducklings in tow, they resort to “steaming,” paddling rapidly over the surface using their feet and wings. It’s this evasive behavior that named the flightless Falkland Island steamer ducks, creatures of rushing mountain stream habitats. The birds have no need to fly, and have lost the ability. These female eiders are steaming in solidarity with their as yet flightless young.

Everywhere we went, we saw eiders loafing along the rocks, often with seals. I fought back a tinge of sadness even as I admired the drake’s beauty and the hens’ perfect rockweed brown camouflage, because I knew that the females should have been busy tending their young in the second week of June. What future does the common eider have in Maine, or the entire Atlantic? The same trends are occurring in the Pacific populations. Perhaps only aggressive gull control--eliminating adult gulls as well as their eggs-- could give the seaducks enough edge to enjoy some population growth. We can't take for granted that there will always be eiders. As the long-lived adults die off, what will replace them? We can be sure that, thanks to our landfills, fishing boats and dumpsters, there will always be gulls. Are we willing to lose eiders altogether? We must always be mindful of our impact on natural systems, and be ready to counterbalance the imbalance we unwittingly create.

A fishing boat, swarmed with feeding gulls

Uncommon Eiders

Common eiders are big ducks, adapted to deep diving and processing mussels and other bivalves with their powerful gizzards. They are supremely well-insulated, spending summers and winters in cold North Atlantic waters. They get on with courting in what seems like midwinter, and by the time the hens lay eggs in spring, the males’ work is done. So here it was, early June, and the drake eiders were already molting out of their nuptial finery and looking pretty patchy.



I don’t know why I wanted to shoot pictures of an eider in nice plumage. Molting eiders are still eiders, but… I got plenty of opportunities to shoot molting males. When this nearly immaculate drake decided to spend the afternoon bathing and preening in easy shooting distance of the Hog Island shore, I grabbed the chance.
He fluffed and splashed and kept rising up to beat his beautiful wings. There’s a faded citrus-green on the back of a drake eider’s head that is hard to find anywhere else in the bird world. And I’ve thought about it, but I can’t guess the function of the fleshy processes that run from the bill toward the eye. Maybe they just look cool to female eiders.
The females make the most amazing nests, great rings of thick mocha-brown down over a grass-lined depression in the ground. They pull the down from their breasts, and draw it over the eggs like a blanket when they have to leave to feed. No help from the drake! If a female eider is surprised on the nest, she’ll evacuate the foulest contents of her caecum onto the eggs. Even a hungry fox may refuse eggs so anointed.

I skinned a drake eider once. Two inches of feathers and a thick layer of fat covered a dense, strongly muscled body. The gizzard of an eider can take a clam and reduce it to liquid. When I got the skin cleaned and sewed it back over the cotton body I’d fashioned, that bird looked like the nicest sofa pillow you could want. I understood why people made feather muffs and blankets of eider skins, sewn together. I’m glad those eider-using days are over, except for some Inuit artisans, because the common eider is declining throughout Maine. They can’t raise young around the abundant and voracious greater black-backed gulls, which pick their ducklings out of the water as soon as they’re hatched. I'll think more about this unfortunate situation in my next post. Not trying to be a downer, understand: just hoping to sound an alarm for a signature bird of the Maine coast.