Beside an eider

Seahouses on a British Bank Holiday Sunday - you either love it or you hate it.  A heady mix of smells - chips, candyfloss, doughnuts, dogs (hot or otherwise); visual treats - people stuffing their faces with chips, candyfloss, doughnuts, dogs (hot only); and sounds - the whirring credit card machines at the Farne Islands trip kiosks, the hubbub of the tat emporium bursting at the seams with punters, and the local lads eyeing up the lasses and going ahh-ooo-er when they see one they like the look of....... and that's just the ducks.

Although I would admit to being particularly partial to a pintail, there is nothing in the duck world that quite matches the eider in my humble opinion and there is no finer place to get up close and personal than the harbour at Seahouses.  Feed them your sandwich crumbs if you want an even closer encounter.



At this time of year there is much posturing going on between the males and the mixed group of a couple of dozen ducks and drakes were full of interaction, noise and bustle with a bit of sex thrown in too. 

Almost as enjoyable as watching the eiders is watching the people watching the eiders. The sound that the drakes make as they throw back their heads and puff out their chests  (here in case you need reminding) makes everyone smile. Its hilarious and so are the passers-by who, without fail, seem unable to resist turning to their companions and mimicking ah-ooo-er.

Much has been written about Cuddy's Duck and I dare say some of it is even true, but one aspect of the UK's heaviest duck that intrigued me recently can be found in my earlier post about snotty nose syndrome

Driven to drink

A while ago I posted a piece about the salt glands that eiders and other sea birds have to enable them to survive without fresh water by taking in sea water and excreting the excess salts. 

Wandering along the Bamburgh shore the other day, I was surprised to see a male eider swimming towards me.  Usually they move away rather than come closer. Then it came out of the water and padded up onto the shore right in front of me.  It seemed oblivious to my presence - which again is unusual.  Then the penny dropped.  It was heading straight for a small pool of fresh water that had collected among the rocks from a small drainage run coming off the land.  It obviously knew it was there and nothing was going to stop it.  This was a duck on a mission.   It drank at least half a dozen times, throwing its head back each time, before waddling off back into the sea.

So, salt glands or not, eider rather have the fresh stuff thank you very much.

Salt with everything

Some years ago, in a sad case of misplaced enthusiasm, I paid good money for a second hand book called Salt Glands in Birds and Reptiles. Well, £1.25 to be exact.  (A friend reliably informed me that I had been ripped off.)  While not the most thumbed volume on my shelves, there are treasurers to be found within.  For example, the answer to important questions of the moment such as  - why do eiders often have drips on the end of their noses?

I had already stumbled on the answer to this one when watching a friend who is an accomplished amateur taxidermist skin out a dead eider we found on the beach (freshly dead I hasten to add!).   A distinctive feature of the eider is the high crown that gives the bird its unique profile (below).

I was intrigued to see that, once the skin was off, this profile was created not by the shape of the skull bones but by two large pinkish fleshy bits that lay on top of the skull, meeting in the mid line and overlapping the eyeballs. Salt glands. Take these away and the skull profile is very different - much flatter as you can see in the picture of the skull below. Compare the shapes and you get an impression of how big the salt glands are.

A closer look at the top of the skull shows where they lie - in the depressions in the bones and overlapping the eye sockets.

These salt glands enable the birds to excrete excess salt in the form of concentrated sodium chloride solution which runs down ducts and drips off the end of the

bill.  Hence the snotty nose syndrome.

The size of these glands vary according to the amount of salt the bird takes in but most coastal birds have them - waders, ducks, gulls, etc. They help explain why ocean wanderers like fulmars can spend months at sea far from fresh water.

£1.25 well spent I reckon.

You can see the salt gland indentations on some other seabird skulls in Greenfingers' Cabinet of Curiosities