Male common eiders (Somateria mollissima) molt directly after mating, when their reproductive role is completed, whereas females molt only after they have taken their young to sea.
Brandt (1943) said that Alaskan Eskimos would have been destitute if eiders (Somateria spp.
Eiders in North America also return early, when a few ice leads have formed (Schamel 1974).
On Attu Island, the pet dogs of personnel of the Coast Guard LORAN station are reported to take common eiders (Somateria mollissima).
For other species the quoted numbers have been less specific, but I would estimate from what I have read and heard that the total population must run into millions for eiders (Somateria spp.
The king ducks (Somateria spectabilis) are the first to appear, while the Pacific eiders (S.
On four or five favorable days each season, at intervals of a week or ten days, there are great flights of eiders coming up in huge flocks of two or three hundred, stretched out in long diagonal lines.
I wonder, therefore, that so many of these mother eiders are without their young ones, for they should all have hatched out a brood of them not so very long ago.
In spite of these various alarms, however, the young eiders are soon on the rock again, and after a while the mother walks up it, too, and begins picking and pulling with her bill over these same black surfaces.
The double coincidence is, I think, decisive, for most of the eiders that have ducklings at all, have either one only or two, whilst the greater number are without any.
These Eiders are remarkably tame, and allow the observer to watch them as they brood over their eggs.
Vast flocks of Scaups and Scoters hang about these northern waters; companies of Eiders and Long-tailed Ducks especially may be met with long distances from land.
They were there by the hundreds, scattered along the lonely bays just above high-water line, where the eiders had their nests.
The ducks and geese vanished, driving southward ahead of the fierce autumn gales, and only the late broods of hardy eiderswere left for a little season.
At the mouth of the river, however, large flocks of eidersand long-tailed ducks flew about, and on the sandy banks along the shore, flocks of Calidris arenaria and a Tringa or two ran about restlessly seeking their food.
The skua besides eats eggs of other birds, especially of eiders and geese.
The following day 200 king eiders were in the same area.
On July 28, king eiders were flying northwest along the shore of Elson Lagoon, thence across the Point Barrow Peninsula at Birnirk, and thence southwest along the coast of the Arctic Ocean.
One Eskimo had 40 king eiders undressed and hanging on a drying rod at his home at Barrow Village (Sept.
On clear days and especially when wind blows from the northwest, king eiders cross the peninsula a fifth of a mile or so nearer Point Barrow, which is the most northern extension of the Peninsula.
Robert McKinley told us that in the last week of April of 1952, eiders (king?
More eiders moved by on clear days than on cloudy or foggy days.
The camp was set ablaze, some young eiders and a burgomaster, shot just before we landed, were soon cooked, a steaming pot of coffee served up, and we talked over our adventures as we satisfied our craving hunger.
The keen-eyed critic will interfere here and say I was mistaken; for eiders are salt-water ducks that haunt only the open sea and are supposed never to enter fresh water, not even to breed.
I have seen three different eiders practice this bit of surgery myself, and have heard of at least a dozen more, all of the same species, that were seen in fresh ponds or rivers, dipping their heads under water repeatedly.
A score of times I have hidden among the rocks of the jetty with a few wooden decoys in front of me, and watched the eiderscome in to feed.
That was also curious, for the water under them was too deep for feeding, and the eiders prefer to wait till the tide falls and then gather the exposed shellfish from the rocks, rather than to dive after them like a coot.
If the eiders are sitting under natural conditions the eggs are hatched in about twenty-six days, and the young birds are almost immediately taken down to the water.
Nature is prolific even in her waste; but although eiders are plentiful, their breeding places are local, and this drain on them cannot long be continued without telling materially upon the species.
The colonies of breeding eiders often consist of an immense number of birds, and the nests lie so thickly together that it is difficult to avoid stepping into them.
In their northern breeding haunts the eiders begin to collect about the first week in May, and by the end of the third week most of the ducks have begun to lay.
The British eidersare essentially sea ducks--rarely even entering rivers, and seldom roving far inland.
The above list will hopefully give you a few useful examples demonstrating the appropriate usage of "eiders" in a variety of sentences. We hope that you will now be able to make sentences using this word.
