The common scoter has long haunted the edges of my mind. I think of this handsome duck migrating from its summer breeding grounds in the boreal lakelands of Scandinavia. I watch for the tattered ribbons of its flight formations arriving to winter along this coast. I scrutinise the sea for flocks far offshore.
Because even here in Dundrum Bay, where large winter flocks gather, any sighting is hit and miss. Scoters’ flocking behaviour is reinforced by the patchy distribution of their mollusc prey. The ducks congregate over shellfish beds, diving from the surface to seize an individual shellfish, which they then swallow whole, to digest – shell and all – in their powerful gizzards. But as a flock drifts and flies from bed to bed, from my perspective on the beach, the birds easily dissolve into a vast and moving sea.
Today the gods have smiled – my spotting scope has caught a soot-black body flying against the sunlit froth of a breaker. The male scoter circles above a mixed-sex flock – I can see the females’ pale cheeks – and then flutters down. Now I’m struggling to count hundreds of ducks as they ride a roiling surface that keeps sliding them in and out of view. With every surging wave that they float serenely up and over, my stomach flips. But the giddy sensation isn’t just from trying to hold a steady gaze on a swirling world. Scoters always take me back to where I grew up in County Fermanagh’s lakeland.
The common scoter seized my imagination as a child on a school visit to a local RSPB reserve. It was summer, and the warden, Joe Magee, let us into a secret: we had scoters nesting on Lough Erne, where Ireland’s first breeding scoters were recorded in 1905. Already I was longing to see this wary seafarer that had made our lough its home. Unknown to me, beset by a range of negative impacts on the lake’s ecosystem, including mink predation, Lough Erne’s breeding scoter population – the only one in Northern Ireland – was in terminal decline. By 1993 it was gone. So today, even as I enjoy the sun shining on a sea of plenty, darker feelings churn inside me. I can’t easily forget that this is a bird we lost.
• Under the Changing Skies: The Best of the Guardian’s Country Diary, 2018-2024 is published by Guardian Faber; order at guardianbookshop.com and get a 15% discount
