On Martin Luther King Day this week we took a trip a little farther down the coast and made a stop at Perkins Cove in Ogunquit. This is one of the easiest and most reliable places in Maine to see what are perhaps the most gorgeous of waterfowl, the harlequin duck; we enjoyed watching nine of them bobbing just offshore, the males showing off their unusual slate blue and brick red colors.

But it was another sea duck that particularly caught our attention that day. Just off the next point north from Perkins Cove we could see a raft of about a hundred black scoters. The male black scoter is a striking bird—completely jet black except for a large, bright orange bump covering the base of the bill. There were also a handful of surf scoters, the males with their bold white head patches, and white-winged scoters nearby. There are three species of scoters that occur on the coast of Maine and at one time the experts had concluded that there were actually only three species of scoter worldwide. But now with more detailed genetic information and a better understanding of distributions, European and Russian breeding populations of what were once considered black and white-winged scoters are now considered separate species. That gives the world, at least based on the opinions of some ornithologists, six scoter species.

All scoters are birds that live in two distinct worlds. In the summer they breed in shallow lakes across the boreal forest regions of the world in North America and Eurasia. In winter they are virtually exclusively marine birds, occurring in flocks along the shorelines of northern seas. Here in Maine, flocks of scoters begin arriving back from the breeding grounds sometimes as early as September. Many pass through and continue farther south for the winter, but thousands of all three species typically spend the winter along our wave-tossed shores. They feed mostly on mussels, snails, clams, and even sand dollars, swallowing the shellfish whole and letting their muscular gizzard crush them and extract the nutrition.

Although still hunted by a few hardy waterfowlers who brave the winter seas for them, scoters are not as popular a game bird as they once were. Some duck hunters still prefer to use the old name of “sea coot” for any scoter species. The surf scoter, with its white head patch, may still be referred to in some quarters as the “skunk-head” or some similar derivation. Palmer wrote in his 1949 classic Maine Birds that the black scoter was also known as the “sleigh-bell duck” because of its musical call.

There has been a collective population decline over the last 30-40 years of more than 50 percent in  the three scoter species combined (aerial waterfowl surveys used to assess waterfowl populations lump the three species together because of the difficulty in telling them apart from the air). In an effort to learn more, researchers on both Atlantic and Pacific coasts, where all three scoter species winter, have been affixing satellite tags to scoters to learn more about their movements. Scoters tagged along the Atlantic Coast down in Delaware Bay have been tracked coming and going in migration along the Maine coast. Some of the black and surf scoters that pass through Maine have been tracked to breeding grounds in northern Labrador, Quebec, along Hudson and James Bay, and even to the Northwest Territories. White-winged scoters nest only in western Canada and Alaska, and some of the tagged birds of these species that migrate through our area have traveled to nesting grounds in the Northwest Territories and northern Manitoba.

All three species can be seen all winter along our coast. Enjoy them while they are here!

Jeffrey V. Wells, Ph.D., is a Fellow of the Cornell Lab of Ornithology. Dr. Wells is one of the nation's leading bird experts and conservation biologists and author of the “Birder’s Conservation Handbook.” His grandfather, the late John Chase, was a columnist for the Boothbay Register for many years. Allison Childs Wells, formerly of the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, is a senior director at the Natural Resources Council of Maine, a nonprofit membership organization working statewide to protect the nature of Maine. Both are widely published natural history writers and are the authors of the book, “Maine’s Favorite Birds.”