Spectacled Eider. I knew when I took the frames in this sequence that this was going to be my favourite moment on my recent Wild Images Wild Alaska Bird Photography tour. This photo was taken at around 2am when the sun reappeared between cloud banks to the west and turned the tundra pools to gold - one of my favourite birding experiences so far! (Mike Watson)
Spectacled Eider is essentially a Siberian breeding bird, nesting in the Yana, Indigirka and Kolyma River deltas, with outposts on the tundra of Alaska’s North Slope and Yukon Delta. It's a bird I had wanted to see since I was a child. Heinzel, Fitter and Parslow's 'The Birds of Britain and Europe' published by Collins described it as a 'rare winter visitor to the coasts of N Russia and Arctic Norway' so it remained a distant dream. Many years later I had tea on a lawn in Cambridgeshire, with John Parslow, who had turned out to be a neighbour of one of my customers when I was manager of NatWest Bank’s now-closed Royston branch. It’s a small world.
My first encounter with the eider was not really what I was expecting, and it started with another small world encounter. I was writing some details of the Grizzly Bear we had seen that morning in the log at the reception of the Aurora Inn in Nome and someone stood next to me, checking in at the counter there. ‘Your name please’ said the lady at the counter. ‘Ron Johns’ said the chap next to me. What a lovely surprise! I swung round, but I hadn’t seen Ron for around 30 years, since I used to spend a lot of time at Cley-next-the-sea in Norfolk. I guess we have both changed a lot in that time and he probably didn’t recognise me either, as the kid lister who used to hang around with Richard Webb. I’m 57 now and he’s turned 80. We chatted briefly and went to evening meal.
We met again afterwards, but all of my Wild Images photography group were done in after a series of long days in the field, so they went straight to bed. However, the sun was still shining so off I went with Ron and his wife Sue in convoy to check Cape Nome. The cape itself was quiet except for a few Harlequins and distant scoters among the ice floes drifting quietly by but we could see there were more eiders scattered on the sea to the east. At least the infernal construction traffic rebuilding the sea defences had stopped for the evening. There were also several vans parked up in the distance with birders and scopes set up. This must be where the action was, so I rolled up and who else, but the seemingly omnipresent Tom Johnson was there with his Field Guides group and bingo! He showed me my first Spectacled Eider! Thanks Tom! I was quickly able to pass the baton to Ron, who at least had a scope (mine was still somewhere in the world of lost airline baggage) – it’s not every day that you get to show the UK’s most famous twitcher a world lifer! If you want to read more about Ron’s early birding career, he features heavily in Mark Cocker’s definitive book ‘Birders Tales of a Tribe’. Ron was a true pioneer of twitching and was always one of the nicest people on the scene back in the day, when we would whisper to each other ‘there’s Ron Johns!’.
The eiders were two drakes and a female, a dream come true from the 1970s and we watched them for a while, gently bobbing up and down in the relatively calm sea just off the beach. Tom hurried off with his group, no time to talk as they had a lot of good birds to catch up with and Ron and Sue also headed off. I went for a walk along the beach in the evening sunshine looking for a pebble to mark the occasion. I am a bit nuts and collect pebbles. There were some lovely small, smooth and rounded quartz pebbles and eventually I settled on one for my bookshelves that looks a bit like the round white spectacle on the eider’s head. Fast forward to the time of writing and the pebble I chose now also marks the last time I would see dear Tom, so it’s taken on an even more special significance. I do not label pebbles, and they all end up mixed on my bookcases so I can only recall where I found a few special ones. I’m not going to let this one go into the mix of the pebble bookcase beach so easily.
Spectacled Eider & Common Eider, Cape Nome (Mike Watson)
The Spectacled Eiders remained distant and only identifiable if I took a photo and zoomed in to a few pixels on the b.o.c. but, after a short while, they rather serendipitously hopped onto an ice floe with some Common Eiders, which was floating closer to shore, towards the rocks of the cape. I was able to whizz along the coast road and clamber down to the water’s edge (not something I’d do with a group!) to take a few photos of them at least at a more acceptable range. I searched for them with the group the following day, but they were gone. No stress though, the Spectacled Eider experience would just have to wait until we reached Utqiagvík.
Flying north, two days later, we passed icing sugar-like snow-clad Denali, the green forests of the Yukon Valley and then the sharp peaks of the Brooks Range before the landscape turned brown over the tundra of the North Slope. At least one million lakes were interspersed by pingos and untamed meandering rivers, complete with zillions of ox-bow lakes and traces thereof. The lakes were mostly frozen with just the slimmest dark blue outlines where the water had started to melt.
Flying over the Utqiagvík tundra landscape (Mike Watson)
There is nothing like experiencing the tundra pools of the North Slope in spring. There are simply birds everywhere! We started our exploration of this special area along the strangely named Cake Eater Road (a derogatory term for wealthy people) and then out into the gas field. Utqiagvík (formerly Barrow) is not a wilderness experience but there isn’t a more accessible place like it in the world for the sheer spectacle of tundra birds. It is a true world birding hotspot/Mecca. It was so strange to ignore hundreds of Red Phalaropes, a bird I normally spend hours looking for in Iceland and Svalbard, in favour of the even bigger prizes. The first eiders we spotted from the road was a pair of spectacular Spectacled Eiders, not far away in a partly frozen pool, which added another dimension to the background. Within a couple of days of warmer temperatures, the ice was gone and with the warmer temperatures came an infuriating heat shimmer.
Spectacled Eider pair (Mike Watson)
Those who stayed up past midnight witnessed something very special. We could see it happening while we were exploring back at the coast. The sun was going to reappear from behind clouds to the west at a ridiculously low angle and we hurried to the tundra pools. The pair of Spectacled Eiders was still in the same spot, and we were able to enjoy the most incredible light show as the tundra glowed in the golden sunlight. Although we tried to recreate this moment on subsequent days, banks of cloud to the west meant it did not happen again.
Spectacled Eider drake, Utqiagvík (Mike Watson)
Apart from spending a lot of time resting, we noticed some interesting eider behaviour. At first, the male of the pair seemed more nervous than the female, which was rather unconcerned. After spending a while photographing them in the myriad shallow tundra pools, another male appeared and caused quite a stir. The usurper was eventually seen off and things returned to normal. Sometime afterwards a lone female joined the pair, and she too was seen off but after this event, the original female became much more nervous, ushering her male away from us and they disappeared out of sight onto some more distant pools.
Spectacled Eider tension, their seaweed-like green crests flared, Utqiagvík (Mike Watson)
The show was not quite over yet, after turning in, I looked out of my hotel room window at just before 4am and there, on the ice, just off the beach was a huge Polar Bear! Joined for a while by another, eating whale meat put out by local people, it was still present at 7.45am for those heading to breakfast. What a day and a bit it had been at the top of the world. We enjoyed some more encounters in the following days with the best eider, but we now had other fish to fry.
Polar Bear on the beach off Stevenson Street, Utqiagvík at 4am when no-one else is around (Mike Watson)
There is something else really fascinating about Spectacled Eider. In 1988 the late great Steve Madge wrote in his Helm masterpiece ‘Wildfowl an identification guide’ that ‘its winter grounds remain a mystery’ and he went on to say ‘There are few sightings of numbers at the time of post-breeding moult or in winter quarters, suggesting that very large numbers must be present at these times in a relatively small area far offshore, probably around edges of pack ice in Bering Sea though this remains unproven’. He was spot on! Not long after he wrote this, the wintering grounds were indeed discovered, out in the Bering Sea to the southwest of St Lawrence Island in polynyas, which are small unfrozen areas of water surrounded by sea ice. I recall seeing a photo of thousands of eiders dotted in a large polynya, when news of the discovery was first published in 1996.
Spectacled Eider drake (Mike Watson)
Spectacled Eider used to be much more common than it is now. For instance, in the Yukon Delta the 1970s population of 47,740 pairs decreased to a mere 1,721 by 1992! The main reason for this catastrophic decline was cited as lead poisoning, from shot pellets that had accumulated in pond sediments on their breeding tundra after a century of intensive hunting. The eiders accidentally ingest the pellets while foraging on the bottom of tundra pools.
Now the poor eiders must contend with the effects of climate change as well. The recent warming of the Bering Sea has allowed more pelagic fish to move into the eider’s wintering grounds and compete for food. An additional threat comes in the form of predators such as Glaucous Gulls and Ravens, which take advantage of the oil and gas industries’ infrastructure, such as pipelines and electricity poles. Arctic Fox, another major predator, has also benefitted in some areas where human activity has helped it survive through access to shelter and food garbage. Like it or not, the Utqiagvík policy of shooting foxes on sight must be helping the beleaguered eiders.
Spectacled Eider drake, Utqiagvík (Mike Watson)
Spectacled Eider is ‘only’ considered to be ‘Near Threatened’ by BirdLife International but their species summary hints that this status may not be up-to-date and that it might be declining at a faster rate, which would cause its status to be up-listed (or should that be down-listed?). I can’t imagine there is any good news in store for its prospects and eider numbers seemed to be down at Utqiagvík generally this year so, once again, it is a bird to see sooner rather than later! See you next time in Utqiagvík?
One final thing. Can you believe there is someone who saw the eiders ‘the wrong way round’? That is, in the order of Spectacled, King, Steller’s and then lastly Common. Well one of my Birdquest clients, with a life list way over 8000 species, admitted to that, having done almost zero birding in the UK. Funnily enough, this is exactly the order in which we saw them at Utqiagvík as well.
Midnight sun over tundra pools at Utqiagvík (Mike Watson)