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Spectacled eider
Somateria fischeri | Brileider | Eider de anteojos
An eider of the Bering Sea that barely exists in Europe. The drake wears a large white eye-patch ringed with black, a mark that stays readable at any range. This is the bird half of birding Britain would have crossed the North Sea for in January 2025.
Voice
Silent. Drakes manage no more than a weak cooing in display; females give repeated guttural croaks when disturbed and soft clucking to ducklings. Away from the breeding tundra there is nothing to listen for, and no European bird has been recorded.
No freely licensed recording is available for this species yet.
Identification
The drake has a greenish head with a round, black-rimmed white eye-patch, an orange bill whose feathering runs far forward onto the face, a white neck and back and black underparts; unlike Eider the breast is never white. The female is warm brown with dense dark barring and carries the same spectacles, pale buff on a darker face and much duller. Eclipse drakes are grey-brown with a greyish head, show no white on the breast and keep the pale forewing; the spectacles still show.
Confusion species
A breeding drake is unmistakable: no other duck combines those spectacles with black underparts running right up to the breast. Females and eclipse drakes are the trap, because they sit inside an Eider flock. Look for the pale, round eye-patch and for the feathering that runs unusually far onto the bill base, giving a shorter, blunter profile; female Eider has a long, straight forehead-to-bill line and no round patch. King Eider has a short bill with an S-shaped feathering border and a dark V on the throat, but no spectacles.
Habitat
Winters in the Bering Sea in leads within the pack ice, tens of kilometres offshore, diving for bivalves. The occasional bird that reaches Europe sits in coastal water: shallow sandy bottoms, tidal channels and the boulders of groynes and harbour walls where mussels grow.
Where the bird is most at home, classified with EUNIS — the European standard for habitats.
Range and movements
Breeds on the coastal tundra of north-east Siberia and northern Alaska, with most of the world population in Russia. Only a handful of Western Palearctic records exist: three from Finnmark in arctic Norway, the first as long ago as 1933, two from Svalbard, and on 13 January 2025 an adult drake off Texel in the Netherlands that stayed for months. That Dutch bird was the southernmost record for the region and remains the only one south of the Arctic Circle. There is no British or Irish record.
Where and when to look
There is no way to search for this one. The realistic approach is to check every large winter Eider flock along the northern isles and the North Sea coast for a bird with a pale round eye-patch and a blunt bill profile, and otherwise to travel on news. Patience beats optics: the Texel bird dived for long spells and surfaced somewhere new each time.
Conservation status
Listed as Near Threatened. The Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta breeding population in Alaska has shrunk by more than ninety per cent since the 1970s. Lead poisoning from ingested shot, predation by foxes, gulls and ravens, bottom-trawling on the wintering grounds and the retreat of the pack ice are the main pressures. Because nearly the whole world population winters in a few dense flocks in the Bering Sea, a single oil spill carries outsized risk.