Great Northern Diver
This remarkable coastal bird built for a life on the water has one of the most memorable calls in the animal kingdom
This remarkable coastal bird is built for a life on the water, and has one of the most memorable animal calls
It’s an ambition of mine to be able to identify birds by their calls. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve stood beside a hedge or in a forest listening to a bird calling from deep within the thicket, desperately trying to figure out what it is from its call.
I’ve never really got close, to be honest, and it just ends up in guesswork. But there is one bird call that I will know immediately and forever, even though I have only heard it a couple of times. It’s haunting, it’s emotive and it’s completely unique: it is the wail of the Great Northern Diver.
A Maine event
The first time I heard a Great Northern Diver’s call it was early morning, and I was standing on the shore of Sebago Lake in Maine, USA. Like much of the rest of the New England region, Maine is a remarkably beautiful landscape of luscious forests and wide blue lakes. It is, perhaps, what Great Britain might have looked like before the trees were felled for industry and the
land given over to the patchwork quilt of agricultural fields.
Sebago Lake is a vast, deep body of water surrounded by trees and holiday homes and, when I first heard the call, it was a summer morning, cool but only as a prologue to what would be another warm, humid day. Except for distant woodland birds chirping on the banks, there was little sound at all; then I heard a sound that I’ll never forget. An eerie, haunting and melancholic call that sounded more like a wolf howling at the moon than a bird attempting to locate its partner in the morning mist. Two ascending notes, each one held and echoing around the vast expanse of water.
I listened to it over and over without knowing what it was. Later in the morning, I asked my host what animal I had heard, and was surprised to hear that it was a bird called a Common Loon.
Thereafter, I spent every morning of my trip on the shore of that lake, listening to the call and watching this remarkable bird.
The loon is a bit of a local hero in the USA. In Maine, drivers can purchase a special car registration plate, known as a Loon Plate. It has an adult male Common Loon on the left, and the money raised from the sale is returned directly to conservation projects in the state. It’s the state bird of Minnesota, the mascot of their Major League Soccer team, and is featured on the state’s quarter coin.
It’s beloved in Canada, too, and features prominently on the Canadian one-dollar coin, a former 20-dollar bill, and is the provincial bird of the state of Ontario.
In the UK, where the same bird is known as the Great Northern Diver, it’s little known, despite the fact that our shores play host to a population of up to
IN MAINE, DRIVERS CAN PURCHASE A SPECIAL CAR REGISTRATION PLATE, KNOWN AS A LOON PLATE... THE MONEY RAISED GOES INTO CONSERVATION
3,000 birds in the winter. That said, they’re by no means easy to see, spending most of their time out at sea, and their dark/white coloration makes them a difficult spot on the glistening water. You might get lucky and see one in an estuary, reservoir or lake, but there doesn’t seem to be one spot that they come back to each year. Still, if you were lucky enough to find one, you couldn’t mistake it for anything else.
Built for water
The Great Northern Diver is a ‘welldrawn’ and distinctive looking bird. It’s the size and shape of a Cormorant, but painted with a far more intricate colour pattern. Its head is a rich black with a hint of dark green and a dark green collar beneath it. Its back and wings are black, dotted with perfect white squares, and it has a tail that looks a bit like a Starling’s coat. All in all, it’s really quite superb, especially in summer, when as part of breeding plumage, the bird’s eye will turn a vivid red.
It has a flat body that sits low in the water, a long neck, and a sharp, pointed beak. As you might expect from a bird that spends a lot of its time diving, its body is perfectly streamlined; from the sharp beak right the way back to the torpedo-shaped body and the large webbed feet.
For greater acceleration, the diver’s feet are positioned right at the back of the body, ideal for pushing the bird through the water at high speeds and to tremendous depths. An adult can dive to depths of up to 70m, though typically it won’t go below 10m, with an average dive being around a minute long.
THE GREAT NORTHERN DIVER IS A ‘ WELL-DRAWN’ AND DISTINCTIVE LOOKING BIRD. IT’S THE SIZE AND SHAPE OF A CORMORANT
It’s so perfectly built for a life in the water, that it even sleeps there, turning its head around and tucking it between its wings and floating through the night.
Though it is most comfortable in the water, it’s remarkable in the air, too. The same sleek body shape that lets the bird glide through water, helps it reach speeds of up to 70mph in flight. It’s capable of long distances, as birds that end up on the UK coastline in winter will have flown south from their breeding grounds in the Arctic, while the bird I saw in Maine would most likely spend it’s winters all the way down in Florida.
However, there is a downside to
a body built for the water and flight; it’s extremely unsuited to life on land. The legs are so far back on the body that the bird can’t actually stand on them. Instead its chest remains pressed against the ground, while its back legs kind of push it along the ground.
It’s clumsy and embarrassed, a little bit like watching a penguin that never learned how to stand. Its awkward feet also mean that it cannot take off on land, only from the water. When it’s ready to fly, it will lift its body out of the water and run along the surface frantically, and noisily, flapping its wings until it picks up enough speed to get airborne.
But in the water it’s an unstoppable force. Fish make up most of its diet, which it hunts and eats beneath the water. It hunts exclusively by sight, which makes it vulnerable to excessive sea pollution or to murky, silty water, which is, perhaps, why it prefers to be a little further out at sea.
Winter visitors
The Great Northern Diver spends its summers in the high Arctic, nesting in Greenland, Iceland and Svalbard, as well as across Canada and the northern USA. However, partially because the bird is so clumsy on land, in the winter it must travel to places where the seas do not freeze over. This is when up to 3,000 birds arrive on the coasts of the UK, though as I’ve already said, they seem to scatter quite randomly around the coastline.
You may have a better chance of seeing the Red-throated Diver. It’s the smallest of the divers, and is another distinctive looking bird with a pale grey head, red throat and a rather unusual upturned black bill. Some 17,000 of these birds winter all around the British coast, although their small size may cancel out that advantage.
There is a third diver that spends its winter in the UK, but except for good luck or a summer trip to the Highlands or Shetland, the Black-throated Diver will likely prove a tricky bird to find. It has a grey head with a black and white striped neck. It is most common in the far north-west of Scotland in the summer, and all around the UK in winter, though with only 1,000 or so birds nationwide, finding one will take more luck than skill.
Whether you are lucky or not, I can heartily recommend searching online for the call of the Great Northern Diver. Close your eyes and imagine yourself looking out over mist-covered lake on a cold winter morning, and then let the wail of the Great Northern Diver sound out all around you. I promise you that you will never forget it.