At Skalanes we have a substantial colony of common eider ducks (Somateria mollissima). The female birds pull some of the down from their breasts and line their nests with it. As eider ducks are sea ducks and spend the winter in cold environments their down is particularly good at trapping air and insulating the birds against the cold.
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| Female Eider |
During the summer the eider nests are visited on a couple of occasions and a small amount of the down is removed from nests that have excess. The eider is then cleaned up by hand before being cleaned by a specialist and used in eider down duvets.
Female eider ducks blend into their surroundings very well and to illustrate this I have taken a couple of photographs. See if you can spot the nest in the first set of photographs, before looking at the close-ups in the second set. (Click on an image for a larger version)
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| A - Behind the chicken shed, can you spot her? |
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| B - Telegraph poles, any luck? |
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| C - Coastal moorland |
Time to see if you were correct...
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| A - Female eider behind chicken shed |
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| B - Female eider nesting between old telegraph poles |
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| C - Female eider on coastal moorland |
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