NATURE: Disappearing ducks

It can sometimes be hard to get outside. Storms, ice, even ice storms compound this midwinter gloom. I made the effort and, wrapped in a great mound of clothing, made my way to the lake.
On my return I was met with a question: ‘Anything interesting out there?’. ‘Just ducks’.
I pulled up to the stove. Whoever first domesticated fire should be immortalised. My toes felt as though they had shrivelled into themselves. Now, with the blood flow restored they gradually unfurled, like the beginning of bracken unfolding in spring. Warmth crept slowly up my legs while hot tea worked in the opposite direction. I reached for my book, to learn more of what I had seen.
Many of our wildfowl are among the best dressed of birds. We previously wrote of the tufted duck.
Resplendent in black, with white waistcoat and an eye of golden amber, this fine creature has appeared in numbers once more. A cursory count had more than 120 assembled in an untidy, ragged raft close to shore, while smaller groups remained beyond the reeds.
The goldeneye, similar in appearance but with a wedge-shaped bill and club-hammer head, has bright white cheeks that help beginners set it apart. Even in the near-dark we know one from another; the tuftie has a growling voice, as if it were permanently disgruntled, while the goldeneye sounds far more optimistic. ‘Chee-cheese!’ he calls. Is it only I who hears it?
‘Chee-cheese!’ I reply, much to the amusement of Mrs B, whose propensity for appearing at inopportune moments is becoming her dominant feature.
Apart from these two regular visitors I found teal in a sheltered corner.
While normal vision leaves these small ducks as grey flecks against a backdrop of brown winter reeds, the use of binoculars brings them into sharp relief. Now we see the chestnut head with its green eye-stripe.
Green, I say, but not one of those forty shades of summer-to-come. No, this hue is beyond the world of art or the work of any man. Both bright and dark together, it is strangely iridescent, near metallic, with a lustre of its own like new-coloured gold.
As a young man I handled dead teal still warm from the gun and marvelled at that head of green trimmed with its border of cream, and had watched the colour of a life lived wild fade before my eyes. What is this that makes the living feather vibrant, that dulls in death?
Perhaps the glorious crown of teal makes him King of his own corner. Yet even without that remarkable headdress he would still be a bird of utmost beauty. His breast is salt and peppered, his sides finely barred with silver and grey. The feathers on his back are a well-made mosaic. And his wings! Why, I doubt there is anything more black or more clean or more white than these.
And look! There again that green that marks the head, this time as the speculum patch worn on the wing of almost all the duck tribe.
I had stepped forward to better see, only to share the view most ever have of the teal – a blurred, fast-winged retreat with a dark tail as it departed the shelter of the bay, along with the rest of the flock.
The sound of rasping wings was accompanied by their musical, whistling alarm, which rang clear as the arctic air they had left behind weeks before. These birds are shy to the utmost degree.
Over a ten-year period of observation, Chris and Lynda Huxley recorded just a handful of teal attempting to breed on 4,000-acre Lough Carra, with no more than two pairs nesting in any one year.
Yet 130 years ago, in 1894, ornithologist Robert Warren reported to the Royal Irish Academy that teal were nesting on the islands of several lakes here in the west of Ireland. Most of the winter teal that we encounter are no longer resident birds, but have come as winter visitors, even from Siberia.
Despite the world population of this pretty duck remaining reasonably buoyant, local declines of up to 50 percent mean it now occupies a place on the ever-growing Amber List of Birds of Conservation Concern, a list now comprised 81 species, the numbers of which are notably declining. The Royal Society for the Protection of Birds lists 54 species on the Irish Red List of Endangered Birds, including several that were once common throughout the country. It doesn’t take a genius to see that something needs to change. Perhaps the first step is education.
Just ducks? Take another look.

Michael Kingdon, a naturalist and keen fisherman, lives on the shores of Lough Carra, Co Mayo.