Common Eider

28 June 2014. Gothenburg, Sweden. Earlier I commented on a small family group of Common Eiders. Today we took advantage of one of the best and cheapest sightseeing cruises possible and along the way saw dozens of such groups, enough to have a better idea of who’s who among the Eiders of June.

First the cruise. This, I know, is not especially on topic but should you ever find yourself at loose ends in Gothenburg, Sweden, then here’s a suggestion. Buy a single-ride transit ticket for 25 Kroner (about $4.00) and take either the number 9 or number 11 tram all the way out to the coastal community of Saltholm, then transfer onto a ferry (all on the same ticket, the ferry is a part of the public transit system), and enjoy a cruise. Depending on which of the many ferry routes you choose, you’ll return some time later after a no-frills, no-nonsense trip around some to Sweden’s most dramatic coastline; all for 25Kr. We did, and had enough time to ride a ferry that made a dozen stops. We accomplished the whole trip (against a backdrop of dark thunder clouds and distant lightning) in the space of four hours before boarding a train for our return to Stockholm. It all worked smoothly although we had barely fifteen minutes to spare by the time we boarded the train.

It is maybe something of an exaggeration to characterize a ferry ride as a cruise, but there are many tourist excursions operating from Gothenburg that offer cruises that visit the same chain of islands and, other than allowing you time to step ashore and shop for a while, offer little to distinguish them from the ferries.

I’m sharing all of this because it was on this accelerated cruise that I managed to get in a good two solid hours of pelagic bird-watching. Maybe for more money I’d have seen more species but my twelve-species list including: Common Eiders, Black-headed Gull, Grey-lag Geese, Barnacle Geese, Shelducks, Great Black-backed Gulls and a couple of Oystercatchers was probably about as good as it gets.

The Eiders were well worth the money and Birds of the Day. I enjoyed long looks at groups of all-brown ones which as far as I can tell would comprise breeding females (which have pale tipped bills) non-breeding second-year birds and this year’s juveniles. The latter were easy, they were all or somewhat fluffy, brown and anywhere from fist to watermelon size, and they tended to scurry after an adult female. Males were at that difficult eclipse stage where they are undergoing a mid to late summer moult, so generally they appeared all black except for a conspicuous slash of white on the back.