Richard Collins: Nesting eider ducks will pay farmers 'rent'
if a farmer offers protection by keeping foxes and large gulls from the nest, nesting ducks will pay him 'rent'. A kilo of Islandic eider down, cleaned to meet official government approval, fetches up to €300.
The ‘big hawk’ of my childhood was a mysterious creature, seen only in the mountains or on sea-cliffs. Not a hawk but a falcon, its official name was the ‘peregrine’.
According to the late W D Lockwood, the name originated with Albert the Great in the 13th century. Falconers thought that wild-caught birds were better hunters than ones taken as chicks from nests. A young bird, trapped during its first long flight, was a ‘peregrinus’, a ‘pilgrim’ on the way to a holy shrine.
The term ‘peregrine’ is found in Latin and Germanic languages. Irish pilgrims, however, might have seen ‘an seabhac gorm,’ as they trudged along the Spanish coast to Compostela, the ‘Field of the Stars’.
Holy Island Lindisfarne, off the Northumberland coast, also has an avian connection. A monastery was founded there by the Irish monk Aidan. Cuthbert, another famous Lindisfarne saint, retreated to the nearby Farne Islands, to live as a hermit.
Eider ducks nested on the Farnes. They still do so today along the Northumberland coast, although my grandchildren were disappointed that there were no eiders on the Lindisfarne nature reserve when we visited it last week.
The eider, twice as heavy as a mallard, is Europe’s biggest duck. Black and white, stout and short-necked, the drake is a particularly impressive bird.
Pope Julius II, Michelangelo’s difficult patron, had the songbirds exterminated in the Vatican gardens because their singing annoyed him.
Most holy men, however, had a soft spot for birds. Like Francis of Assisi, and Colman in Wexford, Cuthbert pampered and fed the local birds. He became so fond of the eiders that they are still known in the North of England as ‘Cuddy’s ducks’. Thanks to him, eiders were the first birds in the world to receive legal protection. The year was 676.
One duck is said to have followed him around. This behaviour may have seemed miraculous to some of his more gullible disciples, but there’s a natural explanation; the bird had become ‘imprinted’ on the saint. A duckling becomes emotionally attached, and will follow the first large object it sees on hatching. That is usually its mother. Perhaps Cuthbert had taken an orphan duckling under his wing.
Their thick ‘eider down’ coats keep these ducks warm. When diving, typically to depths of about 10m, water pressure tends to push a bulky bird back up to the surface. But the eider has a trick up its sleeve — its downy layer thins under the pressure, reducing the duck’s volume and giving the diver a skinny, more manoeuvrable, underwater profile.
On leaving the nest, the female covers her eggs in down plucked from her breast. The grey fluffy material is a ‘gold standard’ insulator. It traps the bird’s heat better than does the domestic goose down we stuff into pillows.
Eiders, despite their gentle and trusting disposition, refuse to breed in captivity. However, if a farmer offers protection by keeping foxes and large gulls from the nest, nesting ducks will pay him ' rent'. A kilo of Icelandic eider down, cleaned to meet official government approval, fetches up to €300.
Meanwhile, Cuthbert is buried in Durham cathedral. When his coffin was opened, 12 years after his death, his body had not decomposed.
