Bird of the Month: Eider
John Mcewen
Gavin Maxwell described the sea duck, the eider ( Somateria mollissima), in his autobiography Raven Seek Thy Brother as ‘heavy, solid, flat-bottomed, oceangoing people; awkward on land, with their legs set too far back for a dignified gait, but deep divers and superb in the momentum of full flight that appears to gain impetus from weight like a runaway lorry on a steep hill’.
The eider’s 65mph top speed makes it the fastest of all birds in normal level flight.
Then there is the haunting call. In Ring of Bright Water, Maxwell wrote: ‘The eider ducks have arrived to breed about the shore and the islands; they bring with them the most evocative and haunting of all sounds of the Hebridean spring and summer, the deep, echoing, woodwind crooning of the courting drakes.’
They are beautiful birds: the drakes spectacular with their broad divisions of dazzling white and jet-black, blush-pink breasts and patches of palest jade on the head; the ducks a well-camouflaged foil, their patterns of black edged with gold and brown. For food they eat crustaceans and molluscs, especially mussels.
The most famous colony is on the Farne Islands off Northumberland, most southerly point of the eider’s UK breeding range. Locally, they are ‘cuddy’ (a shortening of Cuthbert) ducks, after St Cuthbert (634-687).
Five hundred years before St Francis, Cuthbert was the first saint revered for his love of nature. Today, he is the patron saint of north England, entombed in Durham Cathedral. He was monk, bishop and ultimately a hermit on Inner Farne, one of the Farne islands. The islanders ate the eider ducks and their eggs. To stop this practice, Cuthbert introduced legal protection for all the Farnes’ bird species – believed to be the world’s first
The Oldie legal bird conservation and not extended until the 19th century, also in the UK.
Before synthetically filled duvets, the eider ( mollissima – ‘super soft’) was the eider-down duck. Its down remains incomparable as an insulator, barring the cold beyond -35 C (synthetics -7C max). The reason for the soft froth overflowing an eider’s nest is that it is the only duck to moult its down. All other bird down and feathers have been harvested from corpses.
Eider down can be identified because, uniquely, it is brown. Today it is an ultimate luxury. A pound of down in 2008, before the financial crash, reached £596.
In 1937, Richard Perry wrote: ‘At high water, a circular knoll of brown reef is isolated from the [Inner Farne] island’s cliffs. Here the bones of St Cuthbert were interned a second time because, in his first resting place in the abbey [on Lindisfarne, aka Holy Island], he had been disturbed by the bad language of the fishermen passing to and from their boats. A cross marks his empty tomb on the tiny reef, and his spirit clings to it in the guise of the eider’( Country Life, Letters, 25/12/37).
Does the cross mark it still?