Surprising first data for rare British duck

The first British common scoter ever to be caught and tagged in this country
The first British common scoter ever to be caught and tagged in this country

Britain’s most threatened breeding duck has been tracked here for the first time to find out where it goes in winter – and the answer turns out to be rather surprising.

The tragically misnamed ‘common’ scoter – there are only about 40 British breeding pairs left – only nests in a tiny handful of places in the Scottish Highlands. The birds from a single loch seem very tight-knit and are quite likely to be related, so it was expected they might migrate together to a similarly small area to overwinter.

But the first ever tracked birds have confounded Wildfowl & Wetlands Trust (WWT) researchers by disappearing off in four different directions. One travelled the short distance to the Scottish coast, one flew hundreds of miles south to the coast of Morocco and the other two went to completely different locations in the Irish Sea.

WWT Research Officer Ed Burrell said:

“It feels like this mysterious species wants to keep flummoxing any human interest in them. But in fact their winter wandering gives us some clues to help solve their problems.

“The fact they stay apart in winter is a bit like the Royal family never flying together, it means they can’t all be affected by a single issue like a storm or oil spill. So that means that whatever is causing their decline is more likely to be in the summer when they’re all together in the Highlands.

“That helps us to concentrate our investigations. Their breeding sites are managed by Scottish & Southern Energy and Forest Enterprise Scotland, who along with RSPB Scotland and SNH are working with us to try to crack the question of why this British species’ future is so perilous.”


The first four scoters were caught and fitted with trackers by WWT last year, but they’ve only now returned with the data. WWT researchers managed to re-catch the birds to retrieve the tags.

With the focus now on the scoters’ breeding sites, the partnership of commercial, government and charitable organisations are stepping up their monitoring work in the Highlands. The nests and feeding areas are slowly being mapped. Nest cameras have been installed along with thermometers to record the temperature under the egg clutches.

The species has always been rare in the British Isles, the British breeding population has halved in the last twenty years. It is the only breeding wildfowl species to be red listed in the UK.

The common scoter remains one of the few British bird species of any kind about which little is known. Their nests are well hidden and thinly spread across some of the most remote landscapes in Britain, which makes them difficult to find, and they spend their winters on the sea which makes them difficult to count.

The global population is still generally agreed to be over a million. Estimates of overall declines vary due to the logistical difficulties of monitoring them.

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