A few birds from the Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta.
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Spectacled Eider:Spectacled Eider Qaugeq During the 21 years I spent teaching on the Lower Yukon Delta I never saw a Spectacled eider that I could identify with 100% accuracy. But this past summer I saw a few of them while helping researcher Torre Jorgensen do his climate studies near Old Chevak. Needless to say, I was pretty excited to see them at such close quarters. The Spectacled eider is still poorly understood, but I can tell you that it is found in the Bering Sea year around, and mainly in areas where travel is difficult for humans. Summer is about the only time that even the Yupik people see it, since it is then that the bird must come ashore to nest. During nesting season it feeds mostly on small crustaceans, aquatic insect larvae, pondweed, grasses, seeds and berries. When swimming at sea, which is most of the year, it dives and swims underwater mainly in search of mollusks. According to Kenn Kaufmann in his book, Lives of North American Birds, these eiders are able to remain submerged longer than most diving ducks. Kaufmann also says that male and female Spectacled eiders form bonded pairs during the winter before spring migration to the nesting grounds. The male’s displays are much like those of the other eider species, and include rearing out of the water, flapping their wings, rapid shaking of their head, stretching their neck toward the sky and then quickly jerking it back. I watched a King eider do this once, and his displays were almost the same. In a shallow depression on a hummock close to the edge of a tundra pond, the female lines what is to become her nest with grasses and sedges and large amounts of down. She mates and lays up to eight olive-buff eggs, then incubates them alone for about 24 days. As soon as incubation begins, the male leaves the female and she and her eggs (and later her young) are on their own. When the eggs hatch, the chicks leave the nest almost immediately and are led to water by their mother. While her hatchlings are still young she tends to them but does not feed them. They are already programmed to feed themselves. An interesting difference between the Spectacled eider and its close relatives is that the mother does not farm out her babies to a day care, called a “crèche” by ornithologists. After about 53 days the young take wing for the first time. If they all live to do this, their mother breathes a deep sigh of relief and bids them goodbye. The Yupik name for the Spectacled eider is Qaugeq, although it also has another less used one, Ackiilek, which comes from the Russian, “ochki,” meaning “eyeglasses.” Its scientific name, Somateria fischeri means Fischer’s “woolly-or downy-bodied” duck. Recently someone from Hooper Bay told me they don’t see many of these eiders anymore. This is because their breeding population in Western Alaska declined by more than 90 percent between the 1970’s and early 1990’s. The federal government finally listed them as threatened in 1993, and since then their numbers have slowly been increasing. Almost the entire global population winters in Alaska’s Bering Sea, and tens of thousands of the ducks congregate during this time in ice-free waters south of St. Lawrence Island.  |
