Male Common Scoter (Melanitta nigra)(Photo By Jason Thompson – Flickr: eurasian common scoter, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=30890885)
Dear Readers, there is a certain horrible irony when a bird described as ‘common’ ends up on the Red List of birds of conservation concern, but here we are, and here is this rather magnificent black sea duck. I have to bow here to the poetic description from the Crossley Guide, which never fails to amaze me:
‘Common and widespread sea duck, often seen in densely packed flocks offshore, inky spots on the water. Flies frequently in irregular lines, the flocks often densest at the front, like the head of a tadpole’.
There’s that word again, ‘common’. The breeding population in the UK is down to less than 50 pairs of ducks in northern Scotland and the west of Ireland, although the coastal population is swollen to over 100,000 pairs in winter. At this point, you can spot Common Scoters more or less anywhere along the coast, if you’re lucky. However, the Red List designation is for the breeding population of the ducks, which is at a critical point.
Does it matter if a bird no longer breeds here, if it survives in good numbers in other places? It’s a good question, and there can be numerous reasons why a bird doesn’t breed with us anymore. Some are within our control (agricultural degradation, pollution, building and development on breeding sites) but some are not – birds will sometimes change breeding site if they find something suitable nearer to home (the birds generally spend summer in various places, from the taiga of northern Europe to the South of France). But here again, this increased ‘suitability’ is sometimes a result of climate change, and is a signal of how everything is dynamic, and not always in a good way.
Personally, in this nature-depleted country of ours I feel that it’s worth trying to encourage creatures to breed here and to make their home here. There are certainly projects which aim to make perfect breeding sites for these ducks, and fingers crossed that they succeed.
Female Common Scoter (Photo Stefan Berndtsson, CC BY 2.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0>, via Wikimedia Commons)
Incidentally, the Common Scoter was re-designated as a fish for the purposes of Lent and fast days in eighteenth century France, so fisherman would catch them in their nets and munch upon them. As the ducks eat mainly shellfish they would probably have tasted fishy too.
And what do these ducks sound like? I knew you’d ask, so here we go…this was recorded by Uku Paal off the coast of Estonia. What a beautiful, rather haunting sound….
The irony of ‘common’ birds becoming less so. The word ‘common’ also carries derogatory connotations of cheapness, inferiority and vulgarity – NONE of which apply to the Common Scoter! However, in this country what used to be known as the European Starling is now the Common Starling and the Indian Mynah is called the Common Mynah: very PC these days, but also a nod to their vulgarity and the way they are expanding their range – you can tell they are not particularly popular birds.
Indeed – in the UK we have lots of plants called ‘dog’ (dog rose, dog violet), which generally also means that they’re common and not as refined as their relatives.
I awoke to a snowy world this morning. Such events, once very common, are now much less so. Our world is more filled with human made sound which drowns out the growing silence from the non-human world. I often wish most everyone understood and knew carrying capacity, and acted for the good of all creatures. Still, we do what we can.
So true, Michael.