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King Eider | Somateria spectabilis
Koningseider | Eider real
A heavy sea duck of the high Arctic whose drake carries an orange bill knob that shows up at a kilometre. In Varanger in the far north of Scandinavia they are part of the standard winter scene; further south in the map area, such as around the North Sea coasts, at most a few turn up each winter, almost always inside an Eider flock.
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Voice
Displaying drakes give a soft, dove-like three-note cooing, oo-oo-ooh, that carries far over calm water; the female croaks low and hoarse, and low quacking notes are given in flight. Around the North Sea the species is silent in practice, but display parties in the fjords of northern Scandinavia are audible from March.
Recording: Stein Ø. Nilsen — CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 · Wikimedia Commons
Identification
The adult drake has a blue-grey crown and nape, a pale green cheek, a red bill with a large orange, black-edged frontal knob, a cream-white breast and otherwise black underparts, with two upright black sails of elongated scapulars on the back. The female is warm brown with black horseshoe markings on flanks and back and a short, upturned bill. First-year males are dark brown with a dingy white breast and an orange bill without the knob; full adult plumage takes three years.
Confusion species
Eider is the only real comparison, and with females and young males it all comes down to head profile. On Eider the forehead and bill run on in one long straight line, with the feathering reaching forward in two narrow wedges. King Eider has a shorter, higher, rounder forehead with a clear step down to the bill, and the feathering border along the side of the bill curves in an S rather than running straight. Females also show horseshoes on the flanks instead of barring. The adult drake carries a sharp black V on the throat; young males often still show it and females at best a faint dark throat line, but at close range it is the quickest mark of all.
Habitat
A sea duck of deeper inshore water than Eider, diving to several tens of metres for mussels, snails, crabs and echinoderms over sand and gravel and along rocky coasts. In winter it favours tide races, harbour mouths and groynes, usually in the middle of an Eider flock. It breeds beside freshwater pools on arctic tundra, ground the bird never visits outside the nesting season.
Where the bird is most at home, classified with EUNIS — the European standard for habitats.
Range and movements
A circumpolar breeder of the high Arctic, wintering in the Bering Sea, off west Greenland, along the north-eastern coast of North America and in the far north of Scandinavia; Varanger, with Vadsø, Vardø and Båtsfjord, is the reliable European site. Further south it is a scarce vagrant. Several winter in the British Isles most years, usually in the far north and the northern isles among Eider flocks; individuals often return to the same stretch of coast for several winters. Along the Wadden coast it turns up sporadically, almost always from December to March, with Texel a regular spot. In Iberia it is much rarer still, mostly as a young male wintering on the Galician coast.
- Resident
- Breeding (summer)
- Winter
- Passage
- dark = core range, pale = thinly spread
How and when to look
In the far north of Scandinavia watch from the quays at Vadsø and Båtsfjord between November and April, where King Eiders dive below you alongside Steller's Eiders and Long-Tailed Ducks. Further south, work Eider flocks in January and February for a bird with a shorter, higher head profile: around the North Sea at tidal inlets and breakwaters and on Orkney and Shetland, and on the Cantabrian and Galician coast among flocks of Common Eider. Brown first-year males with an orange bill but no knob are the ones most often overlooked.
Conservation status
Not globally threatened, with a population in the hundreds of thousands, though numbers on the western Nearctic side fell sharply in the second half of the twentieth century. The pressures are oil pollution in the concentrated wintering areas, drowning in set nets, hunting and bycatch, and shifting sea ice that changes access to the shellfish beds.
Scientific name
Somateria spectabilis | (Linnaeus, 1758)
Linnaeus described the species in 1758 as Anas spectabilis; because it was later moved to another genus, the author and year stand in brackets. The genus Somateria was introduced in 1819 by Leach. Somateria is Greek, from sōma 'body' and erion 'wool': 'woolly body', after the down with which the female lines her nest. spectabilis is Latin for 'notable, worth seeing', from spectare 'to look at', after the boldly patterned head of the male. The specimen the first description was based on came from Canada.