A common eider duckling that was orphaned is cared for at the Center for Wildlife in York. The center helps find wild eider hens that may be likely to adopt an orphaned duckling. Photo courtesy of the Center for Wildlife Photo courtesy of the Center for Wildlife

“We have to hurry. The waves are moving it further out,” my daughter called. “I think it’s a dead baby eider.”

I was admittedly skeptical, but nonetheless, hopped in our rowboat and paddled out against the wind with a bucket in case she was right – and she was. There was a fuzzy little black chunk floating on the surface. Its bill was face down into the water.

We scooped it up in a bucket and it looked absolutely perfect, its yellow-orange webbed feet spreading out in the water and its tiny wings holding it in place. Every year at this time, we see plenty of baby eider ducklings, but this is the first time I’ve seen one dead.

What I have seen plenty of is eagles and osprey trying to nab a duckling from its flotilla, but never with success. I imagine it wouldn’t have been too long before one of these predators would have snapped it up in its talons and carried it off. We counted ourselves lucky to see it while it was still out bobbing in the waves.

Common Eiders, Somateria mollissima, are a common sight along the Maine coast. They are recognizable as adults with black and white striking plumage. Eiders are the largest of the sea ducks, averaging about 4 pounds a piece with some reaching up to 6 ½ pounds, and measuring in length up to 2 feet.

While our duckling, which we affectionately named “Wuzzy” because he was fuzzy but his life was now in the past tense, didn’t make it past a few weeks, some eiders can live to be 20 years old. In fact, Wuzzy wasn’t alone in his fate. Nearly half of all ducklings don’t make it to adulthood, which is the ripe old age of two or three. Those are just the lucky ones that survive to hatching. Often, only 1 in 5 or so sea duck eggs hatch.

Each breeding pair lays just one brood each season, typically containing four or five olive-grey eggs. The pair build a nest on the ground that is protected and close to water. Then, they line it with plants and the snuggly eider down that humans prize as insulation for comforters and jackets. Eiders were once hunted nearly to extinction for their down, but now it is illegal to hunt them and, instead, their down is collected without harming the eiders from eider farms that are primarily in Iceland.

After three weeks or so, the eggs hatch and the chicks leave their snuggly nests, going straight into the water where the little warbly-voiced waddlers learn to dive and gather food for themselves within the first hour of their life. They dive beneath the surface, sometimes up to depths greater than 150 feet to scoop up shellfish like mussels, clams and crabs that they swallow and crush in their gizzards.

It is during this very early period when the ducklings are the most vulnerable – not just to predation, but also to hypothermia. Ducklings don’t have much fat on their bodies yet and, if you’ve ever had the misfortune to have a down sleeping bag get wet, you know that wet down is no good for keeping a creature warm. Over the next couple of months, they will practice flying. This, too, is a dangerous undertaking as they can end up on land with a whole other suite of predators.

Aside from predation and hypothermia, other causes of chick mortality include everything from what order they hatch in, which often determines how big they are thus how hearty they are, to starvation, disease and parasites. In fact, there have been major die-offs of eider ducklings in the recent past as a result of parasites. This has happened primarily in the Southern part of their range, in places like Cape Cod. Necropsies of dead ducks showed that they had spiny-headed worms in their intestines.

Our little duckling, however, looked quite perfect and peaceful. No broken parts, no shoddy plumage, and no sign of distress. While starvation or hypothermia might have been the cause, I wonder whether it was in fact closer to loneliness. One of the sweetest things about eiders is their gregarious nature. After hatching, ducklings are herded by a group of “aunts” that collectively guard and shepherd them through the first weeks of life.

They travel and feed together, and the adult females keep a very watchful eye out for aerial predators, signaling to the ducklings to “duck” under the water to avoid dive-bombing hungry eagles. These groups are sometimes called brood amalgamations, but I like the term creche better. It more aptly describes the feeling of the collective “nest” that the aunts create by guarding the chicks all together. Perhaps Wuzzy got inadvertently left behind or lost his way from the group on a windy spring day.

Regardless, I’m grateful for the chance to have seen Wuzzy up close and to realize how many other Wuzzies are out there that don’t make it each season. I’m also grateful for the reminder that looking out for each other is a survival strategy that is often undervalued. As always, nature is a fine teacher, and I will value that lesson as a tribute to this little lost duckling.