King and Commoners …

The summer visitor to Svalbard will see a few ducks. The commonest is the Common Eider but if you’re lucky there will be an occasional King in the flock.

The male King is hard to misidentify …

the female can be distinguished from Common Eider by its slightly smaller size and more concave face.

Both species are sea ducks that dive for their food. They nest on the ground which puts them at the mercy of Arctic Foxes. There are often small nesting colonies of Common Eider near the compounds where the sled dogs are kept. Foxes tend to keep away from the dogs. They also lose eggs and young to Glaucous Gulls and occasionally Polar Bears.

A rare bird among the Eiders on Svalbard is one named after Georg Wilhelm Steller, a biologist that I have more than a little admiration for. Steller’s Eider is the smallest of the eiders and we were lucky to get fairly distant views of a single male.

We encountered some other ducks on fresh water.

Long-tailed Duck (or Oldsquaw to some of the politically incorrect) has the distinction of being the deepest diving duck (60 metres, ~200 feet). It is a sea duck but the one pair encountered were on a freshwater pond.

Not a sea duck and the only representative of its species that we saw was this Tufted Duck.

All of these birds dive for their food so too does this one. It’s not a duck it’s a diver or, as the Americans would have it, a loon.

Where the Eiders are seasonally gaudy the Divers are elegantly understated in designer pastels. Note how far back the legs are set on the body. They are on a different evolutionary path than the Auks. All five species of Diver are foot propelled underwater. They can use their wings to change direction but essentially their wings are for flight.