A few birds from the Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta.
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King Eider:King Eider Qengallek One of the great pleasures of my three years in Hooper Bay was watching the King eider migration in spring. Toward the middle of April, as soon as school was out, I used to race down to the beach on my skis and position myself on a tall iceberg where I had a good view of the open water of the Bering Sea. I strained my eyes seaward till I could see the distant movement of flocks of ducks flying just above the surface of the water. On closer examination with my binocs, I knew they were what I was searching for, King eiders. Their skeins of hundreds of birds at a time went on and on, one flock after the other, sometimes in ragged lines, sometimes in tight fists, bouncing up and down across the restless waves of the Bering. After counting 10,000 birds in a half-hour, they kept on coming and coming and coming. They were definitely on a mission, no doubt about that, a mission that would eventually take them to their breeding grounds north of the Seward Peninsula and far beyond to the high Canadian Arctic. As the ducks streamed relentlessly north I was left speechless and could only watch with tears in my eyes as they flew on toward their destination. The birds weren’t close enough to see their colors, but my bird book told the story. Check your own guide, and if you count the colors on the head of the male you’ll find seven, including the yellowish-orange bump above its red and yellow bill. This is the bill-with-a-bump that gets the duck one of the names, “Qengallek,” I’ve heard the male referred to on the Delta. It means something like “duck with a nose.” The generic name I learned in Hooper Bay and Scammon Bay, though, was Metraq, possibly having to do with the absorbent quality of the down feathers. It’s this knobby feature on its nose that for some reason gave it the English name “king,” maybe because some kings had knobby noses. The “eider” part of the common name is an Icelandic word for the bird. Somateria spectabilis is its scientific name, which liberally translates as, “spectacular downy-bodied duck.” Spectacular is the best word to describe its diving ability, too. It feeds in deeper water (up to 200 feet) and can remain under longer than any other duck except the Long-tailed duck (Oldsquaw). Mollusks and crustaceans are its favorite foods, but it also eats sea stars, sea urchins, sand dollars and plant foods such as eelgrass. After King eiders reach their breeding grounds in the high Arctic, they get right down to the business of courting, mating and nesting. Some of the courting ritual has probably already started down in their wintering waters in the Aleutian Islands and farther south. While pushing out its chest, the courting male utters a low, hollow, quavering moan in crescendoing series: broo broooo brOOOOO broo. The nearby female responds with a low, wooden gogogogogo. If she likes what she hears and sees (and how could she refuse a kingly mate with such a handsome knobby nose), she mates and lays 4-5 olive-buff colored eggs in a nest she alone has scratched out of the tundra and lined with her own downy feathers. Nests are located well back from the coast and about 10-50 feet from tundra ponds, and they are not found in colonies as among Common eiders. Soon after the female begins incubation of the eggs, the male takes off and joins large flocks of other males on their traditional molting grounds. From that point on she is in charge of the eggs and young. Within 24 days the eggs hatch and the downy young quickly follow their mom away from the nest in search of food. As with some other species of ducks, the young join with broods from other nests to form what are known as crèches, where several adult females share babysitting duties while the young are still small. They don’t remain small for very long, though, and after a month and a half are able to fly on their own. Then the seasonal cycle starts all over again. After watching these ducks migrate past Hooper Bay in the spring of 1980, I wrote a short poem, which I hope captures the emotion I felt during this event.  Eider Ducks They're back, the eider ducks, and pushing north, irresistibly and inflexibly north. From the beach dunes we can see the grey motes of racing silouettes all soundlessly and endlessly beating their eternal wing pace to tundra nesting grounds below the wideness and wildness of Alaska's spring dawn skies. In long silent prayer strings, then in bunches, like frenetic fists of nervous mosquitoes, they pulsate headlong, miniature arrowheads, across the blackness and bleakness of the fretful Bering Sea, hugging the dancing waterline, and always distantly wary of the stretching muzzles of man's impetuous steel cannons that here and there punctuate the steady ocean rhythm with violent rumbles of hungry human stomachs. |
