RESOLUTE BAY - It’s a most unusual way of protecting your children, but if you’re a female common eider duck, you don’t have a sharp beak or other weapon, other than what you’ve just eaten.
“Aww, she just shat,” says Mark Mallory with the Canadian Wildlife Service researcher as he approaches an eider nest June 5, shortly after the female flapped off.
His job is to count each stinky, slimy egg and take its weight. He spends a long time washing his hands afterwards, and even then, he can’t quite get rid of the smell.
“Peeyuh! Stinky bugger!” Mallory cries at another site. “For the love of God, look at this, there are chunks. It’s really repellent.”
“Mussels,” observes fellow researcher Kerrith McKay. It’s the eider duck’s favourite food.
Other than duck muck, the nest is lined with a fluffy sheet of grey eider down, which has been long treasured by Inuit for its insulating properties. It’s only just above the freezing point outside, but the inside of the nest is kept at 30° C during the eggs’ incubation.
When the female eider leaves her nest to find food, she first carefully folds the eider down over the eggs, like a mother tucking in a child.
Mark Mallory with the Canadian Wildlife Service measures the size of an eider egg with calipers.
Compared to other screaming seabirds on this small, unnamed island in Penny Strait, a half hour flight north by Twin Otter from Resolute Bay, eider ducks are remarkably meek and mild mannered.
While Mallory and his crew count and weigh eggs, the eider mothers watch anxiously from a short distance, eager to return to their nests, but not making a sound.
“They’re the quiet girl at the corner of the party, getting extra drunk without being noticed,” McKay says.
Female eiders aren’t easy to see. Their feathers are brown with a black barred pattern that blends in remarkably well with the surrounding rough sedimentary rock and marshy tundra.
They nest in “moss cups” - sites that have been used by eider ducks for hundreds of years. The same muck that repels Mallory nourishes the purple saxifrage, Arctic poppy, and other flowers that grow here, along with bone lichen, and orange lichen that comes to life when it’s hit by bird droppings.
Researchers believe there are about 500,000 eider ducks across Nunavut and Nunavik. It’s unclear how many live in the High Arctic. “We don’t know. We can’t even guess,” says Mallory.
At this island alone, however, there are more than expected. “I was guessing there would be 50 nests, and now there’s at least 100. So I was off by 100 per cent,” Mallory says.
Parasitic jaegers are especially fond of eating eider duck eggs. This one feigns a broken wing while researchers poke near its nest.
Where these birds migrate is also a mystery, although about two-thirds of Canada’s eiders are believed to fly across Baffin Bay to west Greenland, while the rest fly to Newfoundland.
There are no plans to track the migration paths of these birds yet - the people of Resolute Bay would have to be consulted first. The counts done this year are simply meant to establish how many birds are here, and how they’re doing.
It’s one of five major projects conducted by the CWS in the High Arctic this summer, at a total cost of about $500,000, with support from the Polar Continental Shelf Program.
Eider populations declined by half from 1976 to 1996. But since Greenland tightened its hunting rules for eiders several years ago, Mallory said the ducks’ populations are again on the rise.
Knowing how many birds migrate to Greenland would help both governments develop a shared management system.
Eider duck nests are lined with down plucked from the mother’s breast. It helps keep the eggs at 30 C while the weather hovers around the freezing point.
Climate change will likely help eider ducks, Mallory says, because warmer temperatures mean more open water, which the ducks depend on to forage for food.
Eiders nest in colonies, which is odd for a duck. “They’re caught between the seabird and the duck world,” McKay says.
Eider ducks are also found in northern Europe, where they behave a bit differently than here. There, the males take off when it’s time for the females to nest. Here, they stick around, and let out the occasional ghostly “oh-OOO-ooo,” although it’s not clear exactly what they do.
McKay spent her masters thesis at the University of Guelph pursuing this oddity. Are the males helping their mates and providing food, to increase the odds of their children surviving?
Nope. “It’s all about the sex,” she says. “It gives them extra chances to get lucky.”
Female eiders lose one-third of their body weight while they incubate their eggs.
But before this happens, they bulk up to 2,800 grams.
“They’re like bumblebees. I think, technically, they shouldn’t be able to fly,” McKay says.
When the ducklings hatch, they’re ushered to the ocean by their mother, who keeps her brood tucked beneath her feathers as she waddles to the water.
“It’s like an amorphous blob until they hit the water,” McKay says.
Eider ducks make precocious children. “You’re just born ready,” is how McKay describes them. They fly off before their mother, who stays to molt her wings, and leaves later in September. Eiders can live for about 25 years.
Eiders need to pick their nesting site carefully. If a fox manages to cross over to the island, an entire colony’s worth of eggs could be wiped out.
They also need to beware of predatory birds, like the pair of parasitic jaegers that are also nesting on this island.
So, while the researchers inspected a half dozen eider nests left unattended when a group of ducks took off in fright, the job of distracting the jaegers fell on a visiting reporter, who stood near their nest, then ducked and used a notepad for a shield as the birds angrily squawked and dove at him.