Ducks Unlimited Podcast

Mike Brasher: Hey everyone, welcome back to the Ducks Unlimited podcast. I am your host on this episode, Dr. Mike Brasher, and I'm really excited about this one. We are back after a long hiatus with our species profiles, and this is taking us into a brand new area for the species profiles. There's a lot of new things about this one in particular because we have a video component to this, which is going to bring some additional effects to it that we have not been able to do previously. So we're excited about that. Also very excited because we're going to be talking about sea ducks, a group of ducks that I know not a whole lot about. But fortunately, I have two people joining me that do. And one is from Alaska and one is from the Canadian Maritime. She'll tell us here, I forget. Halifax, Nova Scotia, am I right? Yeah, you got it. Okay. All right. So let me get right to the introductions here. One of our guests you will have heard from before, and I'll start with her over in Nova Scotia, Dr. Sarah Gutowsky with the Canadian Wildlife Service. It's about as much as I'm going to get. I'm going to let Sarah introduce her formally to everyone here watching and listening. Sarah.

Sarah Gutowsky: Thanks, Mike. Yeah, I'm Sarah Gutowsky. I'm a Canadian. I work with Environment and Climate Change Canada with the Canadian Wildlife Service Branch, and I work in the Wildlife Monitoring and Assessment Group. So we look at status and trends of birds in Canada, and I am specialized on marine birds, so seabirds and sea ducks. That's my gig.

Mike Brasher: Perfect. Thank you. And on the other side of the continent, in Alaska, we're going to welcome in Kate Martin with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. Kate, go ahead and take a moment to introduce yourself.

Kate Martin: Thanks, Mike. Honored to be here. As Mike said, I'm Kate Martin. I work for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service's Migratory Bird Management Program in Anchorage, Alaska. But my real title is the U.S. Coordinator for the Sea Duck Joint Venture, which is a binational partnership that really focuses on research and monitoring of sea ducks across the continent.

Mike Brasher: Both of you have expertise with the species that we're going to be talking about today, and that is the common eider. And I have seen eiders. I've never held one. I've never harvested one, but they're a magnificent bird. We've got some graphics to show along with this. Chris, and I'll just kind of cue you. What I do want to do right now is bring up the PowerPoint so we can kind of show folks Just a graphic of these. There we are, commoniders in flight. And we're going to get into a few things here a little bit later on. This is a particularly interesting species to start with on the video component because it's one for which there are four subspecies or four races here in North America. Chris, go back to that video there. Which subspecies or race is this, Kate? It's the Pacific. Okay, and so we're going to tell you how to identify these different races as we get into this here, but just wanted to introduce in visual form the birds we're going to be talking about. So we have a ton of information to go through here, and I don't know how long it's going to take, but we're going to give it a shot. So, the very first thing that we start off with on these species profiles is sort of introducing people to the birds themselves, sort of the scientific name and some of the other things that may go along with that, neat stories associated with the derivation of the name. And so, Kate, do I go to you for this to start off and give the general introduction here? So, take it away and if there's a… You kind of help cue us whenever you need the video or the… the PowerPoint, any of these images that will show up.

Kate Martin: Okay, yeah, I think maybe we should start with just describing what sea ducks are, because common eiders are a sea duck. There are 15 species of sea ducks in North America. They include the eiders, and that's four species, common, spectacled, kings, and stellers, eider, scoters, black, surf, and white-winged, berganzers, common, hooded, and red-breasted. I'm sure I'm going to forget some others, but there's harlequin ducks, long-tailed ducks, buffleheads. Oh, golden eyes. Golden eyes, barrows and common golden eye. And so, sea ducks are characterized as sea ducks because they spend a considerable amount of time in the marine environment along the coast, most of their life cycle. and they're just really tightly attached to the ocean. So one thing that's kind of interesting about sea ducks, Mike was saying like, oh yeah, I don't really know a whole lot about sea ducks. Well, honestly, we don't know nearly as much about sea ducks as we do about dabblers and divers, even though sea duck species are 44% of the duck species in North America. And that is why the Sea Duck Joint Venture was formed. In 1999, they were formed because there was a lot of concern about a population decline of sea ducks, which even included listing stellars and spectaclediders under the Endangered Species Act. Folks realize we don't even know that much about basic biology of these birds. And so a partnership was formed between Canadian Wildlife Service, US Fish and Wildlife Service, Ducks Unlimited, Ducks Unlimited Canada, and a bunch of other organizations to try to provide information about these birds so we could manage them appropriately. That's a bit of the history, I guess, about… Yeah.

Mike Brasher: So the scientific name, Somateria mollicima, did I say that right? Sure. Yeah. Roughly so. Yeah. For a guy who grew up in Mississippi. And so now there are going to be some subspecies designations. We'll get into those here a little bit later. Anything else kind of from that taxonomy standpoint that we want to cover?

Kate Martin: I guess I'd just say they're most closely related to king eider than anything else in terms of feather eider species. And then spectacled eider may be closer, definitely closer than stellar's eider. Stellar's eiders are kind of their own little thing. Yeah. Yeah. Sarah, do you have anything to add to that?

Sarah Gutowsky: I guess we could talk a little bit about where it's derived from, the scientific or the Latin name from Greek, somatos means body and areon means wool and that's just speaking to eiderdown and how eiders are very much recognized. One of their key traits is that they have this incredible down and I think we're going to talk a lot about that, I'm sure, as we go through. And mellissima means very soft. So again, speaking to that incredible down that they have. And I guess we could also chat about a couple of the indigenous names for other names for the common eider. In Canada, in Inuktitut, they're Miitik. And there's a, you know, they're also called Cutty Ducks or St. Cuthbert's Duck. A lot of places are just called eider ducks, and it's not… It's not just eider, it's eider duck. You hear that a lot on the East Coast of Canada. And what about in Alaska, Kate?

Kate Martin: Yeah, there's several different names used by indigenous peoples. I'm not sure that I can pronounce them, but I can try. The Yupik people that live, excuse me, on the Western part of Alaska have a different name for the females than the males, which I think is kind of interesting. The females are… I'm sure that's not perfect, but close. And it means having the quality of nodding in agreement, because they think they're moving their heads pretty often out in the water. And then the males are… meaning something like the big two-eyed spirit bird. And I think that comes from them sort of appearing out of the fog in the Bering Sea and different like big flocks. There's also folks on the northern part of Alaska, Nupiak Sorry for my poor pronunciation, but just to speak to the fact that these birds are really important for indigenous peoples for subsistence harvest and that they have their own names and taxonomy for them too.

Mike Brasher: I appreciate both of you bringing out that point. It's something that we don't think as much about with many of the other species that we've covered thus far, but eiders, certainly, because of their location, their range, they are, as you said, and y'all know better than I do, and you'll tell us about a little bit later on, they're so closely tied culturally, spiritually, and also just from a subsistence standpoint to those indigenous communities, which makes them another fascinating bird or group of birds to talk about. And so I appreciate you sharing those additional connections to those communities just through the names that we have there. Given what I just said there about sort of where these birds are, it may be appropriate, Chris, if you can bring up the next slide there showing the distribution of these birds. This is a slide showing worldwide distribution. So, Kate, you want to kind of speak to that, what we're seeing there? We've got blue and orange colors there. That's going to kind of come in again here on one of the next slides, but just give people an idea of what we're looking at.

Kate Martin: Yeah, we typically say that combinators are circumpolar, meaning that they can be found almost the entire way around the Northern Hemisphere, mostly in Arctic and sub-Arctic areas. And the orange here, kind of peach color, is breeding areas. And then the blue is more where they winter, molt winter and stage during the spring. And then maybe, I don't know if you could bring up the next slide that has the different races and where they… where they are found. So we can talk a little bit more about their differences in terms of what they look like and their morphology, but in terms of where they are, the four races within North America are the Pacific race over where I'm located, mostly throughout the Beaufort Sea in the Arctic and then down through the Bering Sea and the Aleutians and even in Kodiak. And then some are nesting and wintering in the Eastern part of Russia. And then the top right, the Hudson's Bay race, they're sedentary, is their subspecies name. And they are restricted to that Hudson's Bay area. in Canada, and then the American race, which we also will be referring to as dresseri, as their species name. We use that a lot in that eastern part of Canada in the Maritimes, all the way down to even Rhode Island, even down to like Virginia in some places. And then the Northern race stays a lot further north in Canada, and then also winters, a large portion of them winter in Greenland.

Mike Brasher: Kate, I have a question here. Chris, can you put that slide back up there? Let's take the Pacific race for example here. On these maps, does the blue indicate breeding range or is that the wintering range also?

Kate Martin: Actually, that is, well, the blue is the breeding range. What does it say there? Yeah. It's flipped.

Mike Brasher: It's flipped. I didn't even see that here.

Kate Martin: The colors are flipped compared to the other map, but this is correct in that the blue where it says in the legend is the breeding range and the orange is the wintering range.

Mike Brasher: So, Chris, flip back to that previous slide just for clarification for people watching. Yeah, so it's just the reverse, you know, in this slide. And this is my fault. I'll take responsibility for grabbing this map from a place different from the one that we had on the other ones. But yeah, on this one, the orange is the breeding distribution for common eiders worldwide, and the blue shows that wintering distribution. Just wanted to kind of point that out there. That's what we do, that's what we learn as we go through this. Okay, do we want to go into the identification of the four different subspecies? Maybe, Sarah, so there's four subspecies here in North America, but there's more than that worldwide, right? Can you talk a bit about that?

Sarah Gutowsky: Sure. Yeah. There's six or seven races or subspecies. We kind of use those terms interchangeably. Subspecies is the more formal scientific term and race is a little bit informal. But just to clarify what we're talking about there. So outside of North America, there's a subspecies in Europe, the Eurasian common eider. I think that's the nominate species. And there's an Icelandic race or subspecies as well. And then there's also one that's just in the pharaohs. And I think that pretty much covers the common eider subspecies. And then we've got our four here in North America.

Mike Brasher: You're going to have to tell us what NOMINATE stands for when used in the context that you did there for the scientific name.

Sarah Gutowsky: I guess it's just the, it's a classification term. It's the subspecies that was first classified, I suppose. And so we usually name all other sort of discovered subspecies from that species, if that makes sense.

Mike Brasher: And so would its subspecies sort of epithet be Melissima melissima? Exactly. Okay. Yeah, that's what I thought it was. So, okay, well, let's move on to the identification of these birds, their appearance and so forth. We do have a slide here, Chris, if you want to bring that up. One thing that I will point out is the labels that we have here, the different birds or subspecies that we have here in the four quadrants do not align with the four range maps that you just saw. There may be some overlap there, but just to kind of be careful about making that assumption. So Kate, is this you? Are you gonna walk us through the… How do we tell the difference between these things? Kate Turner I will, but Sarah can help me too. They're all beautiful birds, let me just start by saying that. They're absolutely gorgeous. The one thing that I've always associated with common eiders, when I see them, it's like there's a Star Trek kind of appearance in my mind. I don't know if it's the particular colors, but I just think of Star Trek whenever I do so.

Sarah Gutowsky: That's funny.

Kate Martin: I don't, but that's fine. But they are really stark, like black and white, and so they're very distinctive in that way. As most sea ducks are, they're pretty brightly colored, at least the males, right? And in general, for combinators, we've got this like black cap on their head, the white And then that kind of greenish sea green color on their nape of their neck, the back of their neck there. And really the differences that are probably most apparent are a couple of things. One is size. The Pacific race is the largest, and I believe that Northerns are the smallest. And I'll look to Sarah to confirm that. And then it would probably go Pacific, Hudson's, Dresserai Northern, I think. But then also, just in terms of if you're looking out at the water, depending on where you are, you'll know what you're looking at in terms of distribution. But you're going to be looking at the lobe above the bill and how big and wide and extensive that is. And so if you look at the American or dresser, either up on the top right, it's a real wide, big rounded lobe up on that male. And then if you look down as an example for the Pacific, it's very small comparatively. And then the Northerns is a lot more pointed. You'll see that up in the top left. And then Hudson's kind of seems like an in-between when I think about it, in between the American and Northern. And the other thing with Pacifics, they're pretty distinctive. even considered to be a different species at one point, but right now they're still a subspecies technically. But they have a really nice orange-ish bill that's a little bit more orange-yellow than the other species. And they have the V on their chin. You can't really see that in this picture, but there's a nice black V there on the Pacifics that none of the other birds have. Sarah, what am I missing?

Sarah Gutowsky: I think it's probably worth noting that generally eiders are so distinct males and females by the shape of their head, like that wedge shape. I don't know that there's another duck that really has that no forehead, forehead situation where it's just bill all the way to the top of the head type of thing. They have that stout chonky neck. So it's one of the key features and just how big they are. Yeah, there's slight size differences across these subspecies for sure, but generally these guys are up to five, five and a half pounds. They're tanks, as we say. I think we even have maybe an image of one of these birds in the hand, the Pacific, the biggest ones. It might be the next slide even. And I think this is in Kate's It would be in Kate's hands. I don't know if we can flip the slide. Yeah, there we go. That gives you a sense of how big these birds are. And I mean, if you were to see them out on the water, the first thing you would probably think were, whoa, those are big ducks. And then they have that, this male's that really black and white distinct look. And then that really, even at a great distance through binoculars, you could really tell that big wedge-shaped bill. So that's a nice feature. But I mean, these guys are so big, they're so fun to work with. They can be hard to handle, but they make great hand warmers if you stick your hands sort of under their bellies or even under their wings and their armpits. If when you're working in cold environments, Kate, your hands look cold.

Kate Martin: They were very cold. Yeah, this was in Western Alaska. I was sitting on the tundra all day waiting for spectaclediders to come into some nets that we were trying to capture for transmitter attachment. But this guy came in, he came in with a female and also I think it was another pair of spectaclediders. And when they came in so fast, I thought they were going to take out the net. They're just so huge. And then I took this guy out of the net. and had to attend to a bunch of other birds. And so I put him in a cat kennel, which is what we use to move them back to the field site when we need to put transmitters in them. So I just threw him in the cat kennel, worked up the other birds, and I came back to take him out of the cat kennel to band him. And he was so big, I couldn't get him out. I had to have somebody else help me undo the cat kennel, completely take it apart to get him out. I wish I had a scale at that point. I didn't, but I bet that guy was one of the biggest diders.

Mike Brasher: ever. That's a pretty massive bird. So you were thankful to see that eider show up so that you could kind of get your hands warm and capture it?

Kate Martin: Is that what was going on? Oh, absolutely. I was just excited to get it in hand. I didn't want him to take out the net, but I wanted to get him for sure. Yeah, he was bycatch, but it was still really fun to

Mike Brasher: I did want to go back briefly to the identification of those four different subspecies. How easy or how difficult, I should say, is it to differentiate the females between those four subspecies?

Sarah Gutowsky: It's really hard. But I mean, I don't know about you, Kate. The dresseri or the American subspecies, they are quite red, like quite rufousy brown, reddy tinged. And so that can be helpful. But we were talking about this earlier that There's a lot of variation. There's variation throughout the year, even in the color of the male's bill, for example, can change depending on seasonality. And so it can be really tricky. But like Kate said, one of the keys is just, where are you in the world? There's not a lot of places where those subspecies distributions overlap, except for the Northern and the American subspecies up. around Newfoundland and Labrador. And even in those range maps where we had the subspecies specific range maps, you might have noticed that the northern subspecies nests all the way down the coast of Labrador and the American race also can nest in that same area and they will interbreed. So we do get intergrades or hybrids between those two subspecies. So just worth noting that they overlap and they overlap in their winter range in the Gulf of St. Lawrence and around Newfoundland. And so that's probably the only place where you might get into a bit of a pickle if you were trying to tell them apart, I'd say.

Mike Brasher: One thing that I'll ask here, though, is given what you just said, these birds do not reach sexual maturity until like, what, three or four years of age. And so during that time, it takes them a while to achieve that definitive adult plumage in, I guess, both the male and the females. It would be most noticeable in the males, right? So what we were looking at on those previous photos were all adult males, meaning they're, what, at least three years? Or would you be confident to say they're at least four years old?

Sarah Gutowsky: Probably closer to four.

Kate Martin: Yeah, I'd say so.

Sarah Gutowsky: I mean, I think a three-year-old can look up. They're a little messy looking until they're about four, I think.

Mike Brasher: But is the lobe and the shape of the lobe formed well enough even amongst those subadults to be able to differentiate a subspecies or does it gradually achieve that definitive, I guess, shape for each of those?

Kate Martin: I don't know the answer to that one, Sarah. Yeah, I'm not sure actually, I should say. I don't know that one.

Sarah Gutowsky: My gut tells me that the males acquire that as they age because the birds that are first year birds, males can look a lot like females even then. And because the female, the lures is not or the lobe, it doesn't have the same wideness as the males in the American race, I'm thinking. So I'm thinking probably they acquire that as they age as well. But I don't know, I'd have to look at a photo of a second year male eider to say, but I think it's going to be tough. That being said, a second year male eider has a mess of a plumage situation. You can tell it's not a mature bird at that age.

Mike Brasher: I do have a couple of other photos to go through here, Chris, so if you could just… Just showing eiders in the wild for people to take a look at. And so which are these? Which subspecies?

Kate Martin: Dresseri, this is American Combinator.

Mike Brasher: And that's the one that we probably are going to talk most about as we get later into this discussion, right? It's the one that's most… Is it the most well studied? Yes, absolutely.

Sarah Gutowsky: Well, at least in North America, I would say.

Mike Brasher: Yeah.

Sarah Gutowsky: Probably. The Hudson's and the Northern, there are certain sites where those subspecies have been studied pretty well, like long-term monitoring sites. But in terms of understanding population dynamics on a broader scale, probably the American. That photo too, actually, is a good example of how red the American subspecies are, the females, because see the females have that beautiful red tone. I think we talked a lot about what males look like, but the females are subtly beautiful. I think that they have this beautiful scalloped, really quite complex plumage patterns that are really, really pretty. They're not showy, but they're pretty.

Mike Brasher: But they are incredibly well camouflaged. I can tell you that from being in the, I guess, where was I? In Alaska last summer, I came within, well, maybe 10 yards or maybe even a shorter distance than that of a spectacled eider female on a nest. And I was like, Holy cow, I did not even see her and she's just right there and just blends in beautifully and perfectly with the landscapes in which they nest. I'm sure you all experienced that as well.

Kate Martin: Yeah, for sure. Like in Labrador with all the rocky habitats that they nest on and they're a little bit more gray. And yeah, I would be walking along and thinking that there's no eiters right there. And then I get close enough and they flush. It's like, I didn't even, how did I not see that bird? It was right there next to me. It kind of scares the crap out of you too.

Sarah Gutowsky: Yeah, it does. And the crap out of them, although, you know, that's… And literally. Yeah.

Mike Brasher: Chris, go back to the slides. Did I show that one? No. Okay. So that's a different one. So which one is this?

Sarah Gutowsky: I think that that's stressor A too. Yeah, me too. I would say so. There's a wide lobe on the top of the bill shape there.

Mike Brasher: And the thing that you don't have with these, well, I guess, who took this photo? I guess if we… Yeah, so that would give you some of the geographic sort of a proxy for where this photo might've been taken, right? Because you know who these people are that took photos. Exactly.

Sarah Gutowsky: And the habitat as well.

Mike Brasher: We're cheating a little bit.

Sarah Gutowsky: Yeah, the habitat is very Atlantic coastal habitat there. And that photo actually shows really nicely too. I don't know if we mentioned that the males… not to talk up the males more, but they have this blush kind of pinky blush on their breasts that's also really, really unique. Pretty ornate as far as a duck goes.

Mike Brasher: Okay. Well, let's move on here. The next thing on our list is, I think we kind of go throughout the calendar year, winter, spring, and let's talk about pair formation. What's the breeding system? When do pairs form? Who do I throw this to? Kate, are you taking that?

Kate Martin: Or who… Kate Turner, PhD I can start and we can just… Yeah, we can just go back and forth a little bit.

Mike Brasher: I don't have names here on the… I don't have names on the outline.

Kate Martin: That's one thing I wish I had, but… Yeah, I mean, they're seasonally monogamous, meaning that they form pair bonds every year. Um Generally, they're forming their pair bonds in the winter. And then probably those pair bonds get even more cemented once they get to the breeding colonies in the spring. And they're just doing a whole lot of pair bonding during that time. And I think Sarah can talk to that a little bit because she's really spent some time on these large colonies and has witnessed the craziness of the males. But yeah, it's that seasonal monogamy. Yeah. And they're forming throughout the winter and the spring.

Sarah Gutowsky: And I know that that is pretty, I guess, typical for waterfowl that oftentimes they do that. And I was thinking about this a little bit more, how amazing it is. We talk about how eiders as a species or a lot of waterfowl in general might have high nest site fidelity, which means that females will go back, or the species tends to go back to the same place to nest year on year, and sometimes even to the same nest cop for eiders as well. And I was thinking, it's kind of amazing if males are courting and selecting a mate on the wintering grounds, say for the American subspecies, and they all congregated around the Cape Cod area, for example, in flocks that are like 100,000 birds. And we know from other work that we've done that that those birds on that wintering area are from all over the American subspecies breeding range. They're from Labrador all the way to Maine. Birds are congregating there. So that means that females are picking a male and then that male just follows that female to wherever she's going. He could end up in Labrador or he could end up in Maine. I feel like it's a funny scenario for a male duck to You know, he liked that. I don't think they have any idea where she's going to be headed. I don't know. Do you guys know if there's any information out there about male selecting females that would indicate? I don't know that we have like… Well, we can get into this more, but we have this really neat satellite telemetry tracking study that we're involved in that's a partnership with SeaDuck Joint Venture and Ducks Unlimited. And we have mostly females that have transmitters implanted so we can follow their movements over multiple years. But it'd be so interesting to see males and if they're going to different sort of nest sites year after year, and that would be the evidence of that.

Mike Brasher: Yeah, I don't have any firsthand knowledge of that. I was doing a little bit of reading. This isn't going to surprise, I guess, those of us in this, well, any kind of bird field. When you think about the phylopatry in the females is much, much higher. The phylopatry to those natal sites, if I remember correctly, at least for some of the sub-adult males, was kind of strong. But once they paired, like you said, they go wherever the females go. But I don't know anything about whether they're more likely to pair with a female that originates from the same general sort of natal or breeding area as them, more likely to do that than random chance alone. I don't have any idea on that.

Sarah Gutowsky: Because how could they? I mean, it's not like they're down there on the wintering ground saying like, hey, where are you from? I don't think that there's a way to… But hey, who knows? Maybe that is what's going on.

Mike Brasher: Maybe there's some slight differences in the calls or the… Yeah, I don't know.

Sarah Gutowsky: Absolutely.

Mike Brasher: Almost like those regional dialects.

Sarah Gutowsky: certainly they're picking up on something that we're not. But that being said, like Kate mentioned, at the colonies, there's also a lot of courtship behavior. So they arrive together or not. And depending on the colony, if you have a place that has a relatively equal sex ratio, then maybe the majority of the birds are already paired when they arrive. But a lot of sites, it's very site specific as to whether you have a female bias sex ratio or male bias sex ratio is a more likely scenario actually for ducks and eiders in general. But you'd have more males looking for mates after they've arrived. And places like, there's a site in Hudson's Bay called Mitivik Island, which is like place of the ducks. And this is a site that Environment and Climate Change Canada has a long-term monitoring program for the eiders of this site. And I was lucky enough to spend a whole breeding season there from before the eiders arrived until after they left. So I lived on this tiny island for three months. And when the eiders arrived, the activity on the colony. It's a really high density nesting site and it's tundra, so it's just eiders and rocks basically, and a couple of freshwater pools. And the sound of the males doing their constant like, ooh, they do this adorable sound that is their courtship sound. And it comes with this head bob that they do. And it's really something to see just the whole colony of eiders just reinforcing their pair bonds as well. Even the birds that arrive together would be displaying that courtship display to solidify their pair bond. And also males are going to be protecting females from any other males that are trying to get involved as well.

Mike Brasher: So they do have male biased sex ratios, is that what you're saying? But do we know how much? Is it as skewed as we see in some other sort of dabbling duck populations? Do we know anything about that?

Kate Martin: I'll just say, yeah, I think, no, I think it's not as skewed. I think we don't probably have as good of information about it, but given that the females are very long lived and we call case selected, but they live a long time and they don't always breed every year. And so they might not be under as much predation pressure and therefore have a higher survival than say like a mallard or a teal or something like that. And so I think generally it's fairly even, But there are situations that folks have measured and monitored where a certain colony was getting a lot of predation pressure and that resulted in a male-biased sex ratio. But I think, yeah.

Mike Brasher: We'll continue on here. And Sarah, I will direct this next question to you. So if we're kind of going throughout the year with our discussion about this species and are we… Are we starting to talk more about dresseri? What we've said thus far is pretty well, it is generally applicable across all subspecies thus far, right?

Sarah Gutowsky: Nicole Stott, PhD Yes, that's right.

Mike Brasher: Yeah, I'd say so. Paul Matzko, PhD So now we're talking about spring migration. Some of them don't have very far to go. The Hudson's Bay race being the one that we spoke about doesn't have very far to go at all. But tell us what we know about spring migration and then the arrival back on these breeding grounds.

Sarah Gutowsky: Well, I mean, we know that they travel in flocks a lot of the time and they fly incredibly fast for sure, like really low to the water and moving in groups. It's a pretty direct migration a lot of the time and this is when you're probably more likely to see them flying. overland than in the fall, for example. In the fall, of course, they're recovering from breeding, and so they're going to be moving through the marine environment more. In the spring, I think they're in a hurry to get back to breeding sites, and so they have these fast 60 to 70 kilometer per hour flight speeds heading back to their breeding sites, males following females, of course. I mean, it depends on the subspecies and the breeding areas that they're going back to, of course. But yeah, then you'd have them arriving back sometime mid-March to April in the more southern latitudes and maybe June for those Arctic nesters.

Mike Brasher: And I'm reading here some of our notes. This species in particular is, it's kind of following that ice line back north, right? So it can't, it really can't outpace. Let me contrast this with, let's say, snow geese. What do we know about there, about the pace of that spring migration for snow geese relative to common eiders? Because snow geese can actually maybe, if I'm remembering correctly, maybe they get ahead of the ice line a little bit because they want to get back as soon as they can. I know they all do, but is there some difference there that you're aware of or am I just making things up?

Kate Martin: Yeah, that's what I was just going to say. I can't speak to snow geese, but they will need any kind of open water in order to feed. So we're looking for any leads in the sea ice. So the sea ice doesn't have to be gone. There needs to be some openings and those things tend to form along the shore fast ice where there's a current. And so you'll end up with this kind of crack in the ice that they can then hang out in and use and feed prior to hitting those nesting areas. And then they're going to wait probably until the snow's gone, or at least kind of gone, and then start to move on to the colonies.

Mike Brasher: We do have some images and at least one video coming up later showing some of their concentrations in some of these icy waters, as well as showing some diving behavior as they're foraging on some mussels, so stay tuned for all of that. Let's go on up to the breeding grounds. Where do they nest? Are they colonial nesters? I think the answer to that is yes, as we've kind of already alluded to. But what are the habitat types and sort of landscapes that they're settling in? Are there some generalities that we can draw there? Sarah, you want to take that?

Sarah Gutowsky: Yeah. I think across all of the subspecies, we're looking at small coastal islands where you can have low to very high densities of females nesting. They're looking for places that are ideally free for the most part of mammalian predators, but close proximity to the marine environment. So like we said, sea ducks are tied to the marine environment for at least some part of their life cycle. eiders are probably the most marine of all the sea ducks because they also nest on marine coastal islands. So they are not really going to be using freshwater environments for the most part at all in their entire life cycle. And so that could be barrier islands, Also, I guess, Kate, Pacifics are a little bit different. Maybe in Western Alaska, they're less colonial than what I've experienced.

Kate Martin: Correct. Yeah, yeah. They're more spread out. They will nest in these groups, but it's definitely not the same colonial feel and definitely not at the numbers and densities that you see. on the East Coast and the Atlantic. And they're using, like you mentioned, barrier islands. On the North Coast of Alaska, they use those barrier islands along the Beaufort and Chukchi coasts that are kind of like this sandy, rocky spit almost, narrow long islands that have a lot of driftwood. They really like to hang out, put their nests under the driftwood to have some protection. But then in Western Alaska, which I think Mike saw on the Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta, they're more on the grassy tundra right next to the mud, the expansive mud flats. So they're kind of trying to get, like Sarah said, as close to the marine environment as possible to nest. And sometimes you'll find a few in a clump, but you don't really find colonies. And then there's even birds that nest down in the Aleutians. And to be honest, I'm not sure what that looks like in terms of, I don't think it's very colonial, but I bet there are islands where you'll find a lot more because foxes have either never been there or been eradicated from those areas.

Mike Brasher: I think that's a great place for us to take a break. We've kind of gotten these birds back to their breeding sites, whether it be colonial nesters or out in a more dispersed fashion as we see in Alaska and the Western Arctic. So let's take a quick break. We're going to come back. We're going to get on with the breeding ecology, follow these birds through their brood rearing and then fall migration, then talk about a number of other things, including some exciting research, bits of research along the way.

Mike Brasher: Stay with us, folks. We'll be right back. Hey, everyone. Welcome back.

Mike Brasher: We're here again talking about common eiders. We still have a fair bit to go, and I've got Kate Martin and Sarah Gutowsky. They agreed to come back after the break, so thank you to both of you for that. We've got the birds back up on the breeding grounds. They found their colony or the area where they're going to nest. Sarah, you've actually done a fair bit of work here recently doing some research, studying these birds. I think as they came back to their breeding sites, you studied the breeding ecology. The age at first breeding on these birds is like two to three years. Certainly by the time they get to four years, they're like of adult breeding age, right? So what else do we need to know kind of about that? their breeding ecology, and then kind of take us on to, I guess, what you've learned from any of your research regarding the breeding status of the hens.

Sarah Gutowsky: Sure. Yeah. So one thing that we need to keep in mind when we're talking about eiders is that even though the females are breeding age when they're four and they are quite a long-lived species. So on average, I think they live maybe seven to eight years, somewhere in that range. But there's been females that we know that have lived to be 30, five, four, something like that years old, which is they're a very long lived species. And one of their traits is that they don't breed every year. So we call that breeding propensity is how often females take a year off of breeding. And that's a really hard thing to study because you know you have to follow individuals essentially to be able to understand whether the same female had a nesting attempt one year and then didn't in the next year and so on and so forth. And so one of the ways that we're trying to get a handle on that is using satellite telemetry and so I alluded to this earlier, this very large scale project that we have going on that is a big collaborative effort between the Canadian Wildlife Service and all kinds of partners in the US. The Sea Duck Joint Venture has been a big part of the project, has run through the SDJV and is in partnership with Ducks Unlimited. And we have surgically implanted satellite transmitters into female hens of the American subspecies across their breeding range. And Kate could speak to this too, because she was actually in the field in Labrador this summer doing these deployments as well. But we've deployed these at breeding sites all the way from Labrador, Newfoundland, Quebec, New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, and Maine, and even actually in Rhode Island now as well on the wintering grounds. And so we're looking at these females when they come back to their breeding areas each spring. We have some females now that we have three years of continuous location information. And so we can look at the patterns of their space use. around their colony and we can guess at whether that female made a breeding attempt in that year based on how she moves around the colony. Does she have a period where she's on an island for an extended period of time that would tip us off that she's incubating? Or did she come and just hang around the breeding area but not actually interact with islands? So that's one of the cool ways that we're trying to get at this breeding propensity question. And the reason you need to understand this is because if you're trying to understand the population dynamics of a species like eiders that are harvested, and I'm sure we'll talk lots about that too, but if we're trying to set harvest regulations or just understand what's driving population changes, we need to understand things about their basic breeding biology, which includes how often they nest, how successful they are on average, how long they live, all these important, we call them vital statistics about these birds. Breeding propensity is pretty important because if you assumed every female had a nest every year, you would be way off with what you would expect the population to be doing. So that's one of the things that we're doing. So I guess when a female comes back to the breeding colony, the colony that she was probably maybe hatched out of an egg on, or at least has had a nesting attempt herself on before. She's found her mate. She's going to start looking for a nest site. And so nest site selection is all female driven. She's going to explore around the island and suss out some different sites and then choose a spot. And that spot could be a spot that she or somebody else has used before. So eider nests, they are like a little depression usually. The female, if it's a new spot she's chosen, she's going to use her breast to push down a little divot in the ground and spin in a little circle and push with her feet. make a little divot, or she might use a spot that was used before. And so she'd probably fluff up the substrate to make it a little less compact. And then she's going to start lining the nest with her own down from her belly. And so eiders pull out their own down. And yeah, this would be a great spot to have a look at some of the images that Kate and I have shared. So on the right there, that's an eider nest. And you can see there's five eggs in each of those nests. And so your clutch size is usually for eiders between three to five, sometimes six. Their eggs are kind of huge. That's my hand on the right. So like for scale, I think that's kind of helpful.

Mike Brasher: And so what's the substrate there that that nest is in? Like on the left-hand side, it looks kind of rocky. Maybe there's some grasses and sedges there, but we don't have as much of a backed out view on the right. What am I looking at there?

Sarah Gutowsky: That's a nest on Mitivik Island, so in Hudson's Bay, at the northern end of Hudson's Bay.

Mike Brasher: I should have known that from the photo alone, right?

Sarah Gutowsky: And the substrate that you're seeing is actually seaweed. That's dried seaweed that's around the coastal edge of this tiny, high-density colony. And the island itself probably gets washed over throughout the winter, and all of that seaweed sort of accumulates along the shore, and then that's just dried up seaweed. And if you backed out, But this is tundra. There's not a tree in sight. So it's just females on the ground blending in, like you said, Mike, so that they're hiding from predators. And I'm sure we'll talk about this later, but there are some pretty serious predators that can be going after these birds on their nests.

Mike Brasher: Yeah. And so let's see, what else regarding your study or anything else regarding the nesting behavior of those birds there?

Sarah Gutowsky: Probably worth mentioning, incubation is about 26, 28 days, somewhere in there. And the females are fasting while they're incubating. So she lays her clutch and then she starts incubating continuously. And during that time, it's worth mentioning, I guess, that eiders are capital breeders, which means that they are essentially fasting while they're incubating. And so they might take some little trips off the nest in the middle of the night to get a drink of fresh water That's another thing that I think is an important element of their selection of their nest sites. They do need access to some fresh water, and so they can't usually nest on islands or areas where there's no at least pools that accumulate rainwater or some small ponds. Because not only do the females need access to that, they don't need access to that, they can drink salt water, but the ducklings will need access to that before they get taken to the marine environment. So at any rate, females will go and get drinks of water, usually at night. One of the reasons that I know that from personal experience is because I put trail cameras on a colony in Nova Scotia, the American subspecies, and I wasn't meaning to capture eiders on these trail cameras. They are for studying predator activity around storm petrel burrows, and storm petrels are these tiny, adorable seabirds. that nest underground. And we have some sites in Atlantic Canada that we're interested in better understanding how the predation pressure that these little birds face. And so I have these motion triggered trail cameras that are meant to catch predators around the burrows, but instead I get photo bombed by eiders going back and forth in front of my cameras all the time. And so this is an example of a bunch of female hens that are on the forest floor on this. Again, this is a more southern nesting site. So in Atlantic Canada, these are forested islands a lot of the time. So these females are walking along the forest floor, coming and going from their nests. And on this particular camera, I had of high traffic of a single bird just going back and forth in front of the camera. And I thought, why is this female doing? And then a few days later, I captured this. And so I was like, oh, it's not just one female every time. They are not individually marked. So I was catching multiple females that were coming and going from their nests. And so this is an instance of catching these photobombing female eiders around these petrel burrows. And I think the next image is… two females actually in this case that are leading a little group of ducklings to the coast and a male attending, which is kind of interesting because typically with eiders, once the female starts incubating, often the males leave and are no longer really involved. At that point, they're going to go and they're going to start their molt while the females are still incubating and then rearing the chicks. But in this case, I was catching males following the females, so they were sticking around and probably mate guarding in some way. But there's two females here and more than five ducklings, which probably indicates that this is the start of crushing behavior, which That is something that eiders are very well known for as well.

Mike Brasher: So, Sarah, that female that I see on the right side there, she's not on a nest? No, she's not on a nest. Okay, I thought she was nesting.

Sarah Gutowsky: No, she's just snuggled in. Really? I don't know what they're doing in the middle of the forest. All those little tags that you see, those are tags marking individual storm petrel burrows. No way. So there's storm petrels under the ground right there with tiny little fluffy chicks. It's so cute. And then above, you've got your ducklings. Anyway. How far were they traveling?

Mike Brasher: Because that's a risky, very risky behavior, if there's any kind of predator community around. Because these birds, they're not like mallards or wood ducks or any dabbling ducks that can take off just in a vertical fashion. They have to get a running start being- And they can barely walk too.

Sarah Gutowsky: Yeah, their feet are very far back on their body. They're very waddly. That's very true.

Mike Brasher: How far were they traveling over land? You might have said this.

Sarah Gutowsky: They're usually pretty small islands. I mean, in this case, they're, I don't know, maximum I mean, it's a fire, it is a gauntlet and there are a lot of avian predators and potentially mammal predators as well at that time. Yeah.

Kate Martin: Sarah, I think those photos are really interesting too because it just shows the difference in different breeding habitats, right? That is not where I would expect to see an ater, given my experiences in Alaska and the Arctic. So, seeing them running around under trees is really interesting and just that they've adapted to all these different habitats throughout the Arctic and sub-Arctic is really, really interesting.

Mike Brasher: Chris, go back two slides. I had you skip over one showing the eider hen with her ducklings. Is that Eastern Canada as well?

Sarah Gutowsky: That's the Hudson's Bay again, so that's Meekevique Island. The whole island just has these little spurts of sedge grasses, whatever, but then otherwise it's just this terrible mess that destroys your boots of granite rock everywhere that's covered in lichen.

Mike Brasher: Yeah. And so, eiders are like other waterfowl species. The young are hatched precocial, meaning they're down covered within about 24 hours, I'm guessing. The ducklings are dry and ready to go, ready to leave the nest. What about feeding? I mean, I know they had to be able to feed on their own, but what's Is now the right time to talk about what these little dudes and dudettes are eating?

Sarah Gutowsky: For sure, yeah.

Kate Martin: Kate, do you want to take the post-leave-in-the-nest period? Yeah, I thought mentioning again the need for fresh water for the ducklings. They hatch, and for the first four or five days, they do need to find some place or some puddle, something to drink fresh water as their salt glands develop. So that's something that's kind of unique to eiters and sea ducks is that they develop these salt glands so they can eventually use salt water. for drinking, but not for those first few days. So those ducklings need to find some source of fresh water. And then the female tends to take them right out to the ocean, to the marine areas after that. And they start to feed on kind of smaller invertebrates because they're little guys. So they're probably going to cue in on amphipods and some other smaller inverts down on the bottom, but they dive instantly, right? They're already ready to start diving down to the bottom and pop back up their little downy bodies. But I don't know if Sarah was going to talk about this or she kind of mentioned it, but they also at that point will start to form these family groups. Well, they're not even necessarily family groups, but they're called crushes. where they have brood amalgamation. So broods maybe that are nearby each other end up starting to hang out together and they can be in groups of up to, I think there's been observations, 150 ducklings in one group with not all the females. So maybe a few females, maybe a bunch of females, but sometimes females will just leave their brood there with the other attending females, which is kind of a neat behavior and pretty cool to see that many ducklings in one group.

Sarah Gutowsky: And with their aunties as well. So there's this odd behavior that's sweet in eiders where there's anti-hens, so unrelated females that either maybe had a failed breeding attempt or pre-breeding age will tend to hang around with these crushes. And yeah, we call them antis. And so that's why in that image, the trail cam capture, I said that there's the female and then there's probably the anti is just snuggled in there sitting nearby. And It's not entirely well known why antis display anti-behavior. It doesn't necessarily benefit them, but they can help with brood protection in some ways. But actual mother hens will Well, it goes a little bit both ways. So sometimes a female, I've seen it both ways where a female has a fox or a bear come up to her nest and she just takes off and abandons ship. But other times you do see them do some defensive maneuvers. to protect, especially when they have their broods, when they're at the point where the ducklings are in the creches out in the marine environment, they definitely try to help the ducklings do some evasive maneuvers for… Gulls especially are a big predator of the ducklings when they're that small in the marine environment.

Mike Brasher: So, you were getting to it, and maybe you said all of it, my mind was looking at the outline here. What are some of those primary predators for eider ducklings?

Kate Martin: Sarah, I mean, she already mentioned a couple of things, but gulls, the larger gulls, black-backed gulls on the east side, gaucus gulls over on the west side will definitely take a duckling, especially in that first week when they're small.

Mike Brasher: Which is a pretty violent thing to think about, right?

Kate Martin: It's got to be… It's pretty hard to watch. Yeah. And then I think fox, definitely as we saw in those camera traps, the broods are walking along the ground for a little while before they get to the marine area in some cases. And that would be when they're really at risk for fox predation or even probably mink, that sort of mustelid predator. Yeah. And then for eggs, we didn't really talk about predation on eggs, which would be a little bit different, right? Primary predator would be fox when they are on those islands or if the birds are nesting on the mainland. So a red fox and Arctic fox, depending on where they are. Definitely, jaegers will take eggs, gulls will take eggs. If a female gets flushed from a nest, the gulls and jaegers will come down and get some And then something that's kind of been happening more recently is polar bear predation in some of these colonies. As there's less and less sea ice in these areas, polar bears are coming onto the mainland at different times than they used to, like a little earlier in the season. And they're starting to take some eitherness. They get on a colony and they just walk through and eat eggs. And I think Sarah has a little bit more information about how there's kind of an interesting like There's a lot of tag teaming going on between polar bears and gulls, predation-based.

Mike Brasher: Chris, I think we have a photo. You had to kind of go towards the end, but I think now would probably be a good time to talk about that, right? Or to show that, the polar bear getting a breakfast or a lunch or something.

Sarah Gutowsky: Yeah, definitely eating an egg in the photo, as we'll see, and that would be probably a photo from, again, Mitivik Island, so you can see those granite rocks on the ground. This is a site, like I said, that's been a long-term monitoring site for this eider colony since the 80s, a very long-term monitoring site, really useful information coming from this site. one of the key sites that has allowed us to watch this evolution of bears turning to eider eggs as a primary food source during this period when they, like Kate was saying, don't have access to sea ice as a platform for hunting. And so when I was on this island working in 2010, that was the last season actually that they had a field team on the island for the entire summer because of the increasing prevalence of bears showing up on the island to take advantage of what is a smorgasbord, a buffet of eiders, especially in a highly dense colony like this. I think it's possible that in these higher Arctic environments that that strategy of high density on islands like this isn't going to work with the changes in the polar bear foraging patterns in those areas. But yeah, I was one of the last teams to get to spend the summer on this island before it was kind of recognized that this is not a sustainable operation for having teams on the island. And it was actually really sad because we spent this whole season monitoring each of us. There were six of us who lived on this island for the summer and you each monitored a plot of eider nests and we were monitoring their nest success. And you would crawl into your blind every day and count your ducks And then one day a bear shows up and just eats your whole plot. And this was the beginning of sort of the end of that monitoring strategy for the colony. And they really turned to monitoring the interactions of the bears with the ducks. And like Kate said, also the gulls. So that colony in particular is a herring gull. nesting colony. And when the bears come, of course, the gulls just follow and clean up after. And bears are not very efficient predators for eider eggs. They kind of just walk nest to nest, spook off the hen, and then munch the eggs. And they just leave devastation in their wake, but they don't eat every egg in the nest, and they're not very good at searching for the nest, but the gulls come along and they clean up a lot of what the bears miss. But they've really turned that site into a site for monitoring bear activity on an eider colony. And so a lot of work with drones and a lot of really interesting research that's come out of it since 2010 when I was last there.

Mike Brasher: If a bear comes through and only takes one or two eggs, and let's say a Jaeger or some other gull is not there to clean up, will the female go back to that nest?

Sarah Gutowsky: I think it would be, there's no general statement that covers that one, I don't think. I'm trying to think whether I saw that happen, and I would say yes. If there's crunched, broken eggs in a nest, the female probably isn't likely to go back and try and incubate on that mess. If there's one or two eggs left, she'd probably just abandon for the season, but if an egg was taken without causing complete chaos in the nest, she would probably come back and continue trying to incubate.

Mike Brasher: Okay. Yeah. Kate, any experience, insight on anything that you've seen? I mean, I don't know. Polar bears, it's not really an issue out there yet where you are, is it?

Kate Martin: It is in Northern Alaska. So along the Chukchi coast and the Beaufort sea coast, for sure it's happening. It's kind of the same thing. There were some long-term monitoring sites like at Arctic National Wildlife Refuge that they just had to stop doing the work because it was too dangerous for the technicians to be out on those barrier islands with the polar bears. But in Western Alaska, they don't occur there. And I guess I'd just say with that question about whether they would come back, I totally agree with Sarah. I think sometimes a fox will take one egg out of a nest or two eggs and the female come back. That's not as big of a deal, but those polar bears, they just make… Bears just make a mess. They just crunch everything and throw it everywhere. And it's probably not very hospitable for a female to come back and try to incubate more eggs.

Sarah Gutowsky: I feel like it's the definition of a bull in a china shop, right? I mean, it's pretty much the perfect example of that.

Mike Brasher: Yeah, I think that's even occurring on some snow goose colonies. I think Dr. Rocky Rockwell has talked about that. And so yeah, polar bears are finding other things to eat as their system changes. One of the things that kind of crossed my mind, and I believe we even talked about this briefly a few weeks ago as we were planning this. Common eiders are the largest duck species we have, yet it's still female-only parental care, the logic there being there's really not… I mean, these ducklings are precocial, there's not a need for both parents to feed, and so in that sense, The only situation in which you typically see those lifelong pair bonds in waterfowl is if the species is, well, at least in North America, there's going to be some differences as you get kind of into the southern hemisphere, I think. But up here, anyway, it's the only times you see it in waterfowl is if the the birds are of a large enough size for that male to actually confer some advantage in fending off predators. And certainly we see it in swans, we see it in geese. Brant form lifelong pair bonds, but they too, having some experience with them, they're on the smaller side and they're not quite as adept at fending off some of the larger predators. And so the It's like where is that that cut off from a size standpoint, where it's no longer advantageous for a male to stick around and provide some of that parental care and duckling defense and so wherever it is clearly it's it's it's. Common eiders, or eiders in general, are below that threshold. Have you all studied these things? You're out there thinking about these birds a lot. Those type of questions come into your mind where you're doing this sort of mental comparison of different species of waterfowl and why one does something different than the other?

Sarah Gutowsky: I think that's the crushing piece, actually, is kind of like how eiders are getting around not having the male stick around and contribute to that, is that they crush together. It's basically just a numbers game. The more ducklings you have in a group, the lower the probability any single individual is going to get predated. And so they kind of get around it, I think, that way, in a sense.

Kate Martin: Yeah. And then also the longevity of the birds, right? Like how long live they are. If their ducklings, I mean, it's sad, but if their ducklings get eaten in one year, most likely those females are going to be able to come back in another year and try again, which I guess is probably the case for some geese. But I think those two things together probably are their strategy, right? Yeah.

Mike Brasher: So Sarah and Kate, whenever we started this idea of doing this species profile episode with the two of you and we did some research and pulled together an outline and I think it's like maybe seven or eight pages. We knew there was a lot of information. We didn't know how quickly we'd be able to get through it. We kind of had some technical difficulties or some final, I shouldn't say difficulties, but we had some additional planning that we were taking care of at the beginning of our discussion or our time period today. So all that to say, we're not going to get through all of this outline today because several of us have something, a hard stop here coming up in about 10 minutes. So, I think what we will do is we have one more item here we can talk about fall and winter, kind of fall migration. If there's anything notable, I mean, I guess we skipped over the molt, but is there anything noteworthy from an eider standpoint that is distinct from their wing molt from other waterfowl species, Kate?

Kate Martin: Yeah, I don't think so. I mean, I feel like they have a similar strategy where the males are going to leave first, similar to other ducks. Males are going to leave once the female starts incubating in most cases, and they're going to molt earlier. So they're headed to a molt area in July. ish, maybe earlier, depending on the distribution. But yeah, they're going to be there. They're going to molt first, and then females will start to follow. The females that failed will go next. And then the females that are successful actually tend to molt near the breeding sites. Right, Sarah? Maybe that is a little bit different than some species.

Sarah Gutowsky: Sarah Betz, Ph.D. : Even males as well, actually. They don't often go too far.

Mike Brasher: And so do they molt in open water areas or is that what they're seeking?

Sarah Gutowsky: Sometimes, but also, well, yeah, pretty open water areas in some cases, or in some cases, slightly more sheltered bays. I think what they're looking for, the most important thing is relatively shallow water, 20 meter depth at most, because they still need to be able to access food. And we actually haven't talked about what adult eiders eat. We talked a little bit about what ducklings will eat in those early first days, but that's- We're not going to have time to cover that. Not even at all their diet? Oh my gosh, that's what makes eiders so interesting.

Mike Brasher: No, we have to tease that. That has to be where we pick up the next one.

Sarah Gutowsky: Okay, fine. Well, males are where there's food, but we won't talk about what that food is.

Mike Brasher: That's right. And so fall migration, of course, is the other part of this. As we are, again, kind of going chronologically through the year, after they molt, fall migration occurs. Anything to say about the triggers for what we see in eiders, without talking about what they eat?

Sarah Gutowsky: I mean, they just migrate after they're finished molting, essentially, is when the males are going to start moving usually south. And where they winter is dependent, again, on the subspecies. But for our American subspecies, for example, they're wintering anywhere from the Gulf of St. Lawrence down around along the coast of Maine. But primarily, there's a very large contingent that are going to be migrating in the fall down to their wintering areas around Cape Cod, that area.

Mike Brasher: Well, I hate to do this, but that is probably where we're going to have to leave this. We do have quite a bit more information to cover. The food habits. We have a video. We're going to talk a little bit about their habitat preferences, Paulinias. It's a really interesting phenomenon and their association with those areas. We need to talk about hunting. population status, some of the conservation interests, and some of the work that's being done to benefit this species. So we have a lot more to cover, and that's kind of the way it goes when you get a couple of experts involved on a topic that they care so much about. We're going to close out now and then we will find a time to continue on with this discussion and we'll have a part two on the common eider. So, Sarah Gutowsky with Environment and Climate Change Canada and Kate Martin with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. Thank you so much, both of you, for joining us and sharing your expertise and hang tight after we close this out because we're going to have to schedule something else.

Kate Martin: Thanks, Mike.

Mike Brasher: I'll also thank our producer, Chris Isaac, for the great job that he does. Also, Landon McCullough, our video editor, for getting this out to you in a video format. To you, the listener, and also the watcher, we thank you for your time, and we thank you for spending it with us. We encourage you to like and subscribe to our Ducks Unlimited platforms, to our YouTube platform, to get caught up on the latest of all the information we're putting out there. So thanks, everyone, for your support of wetlands and waterfowl conservation.