Bird of the Month: Tufted

The Tufted Duck

by john mcewen illustrated by carry akroyd

The jaunty topknot on the head of the drake tufted (Aythya fuligula) – allied to the species’s jack-in-the-box water antics – makes them the jokers in the duck pack.

Those with only a passing interest in birds, such as children, are excited to find some ducks dive and zoom about underwater. The tufted does this incessantly, diving with particular panache – not at a slant, but on the spot.

It emerges after as long as a minute, dry as dust, the water droplets, bright as its yellow eyes, slipping off the black (drake) or brown (duck) waterproof plumage like quicksilver.

Until the 19th century, they were only winter migrants. The first record of a British nesting was in 1849, in Yorkshire. Today it is our commonest diving duck. The 19,000 residents are joined in winter by 140,000 incomers, notably from Russia: a tufted ringed in London’s St James’s Park was recovered a year later in Siberia.

Freshwater lakes are the preferred breeding habitat and they have benefited from the modern demand for reservoirs and gravel pits. The downy nest is hidden in vegetation. Islets are a favourite location, not least in urban lakes. Ducklings dive adeptly within hours of hatching.

Tufted swim in company and fly in small, quick-winged packs. They formed part of Lord Grey’s wildfowl collection at Fallodon and contribute to one of the most memorable passages in his classic book The Charm of Birds.

He had two ponds, sometimes dominated by them to the point of overcrowding: ‘Tufted ducks are prone to what Peacock calls “stay-athometiveness”. The young broods are apt to be content with the place in which they have been reared… Some eight or ten of these tufted ducks will stand at my feet, looking up in the most engaging way to be fed by hand.’

Grey was not averse to giving ducks bread – helpful with regard to children’s fun.

Tufted tame easily and Grey’s homeraised colony was swelled by indistinguishable intruders. There was ‘nothing to be done but acquiesce’.

Early one windless Christmas Day, he found all his duck species congregated to feed at the first pond. So he went and sat by the second, which was contrastingly still and deserted.

Slowly the ducks arrived from the other pond and, apparently rejoicing in the previously absent sunlight, ‘began to sport and play’ until ‘there was not a square foot of water that was not in constant agitation’.

One imagines it was the numerous tufted above all that ‘dived unexpectedly, travelled under water, came up in some new place and then, as if surprised by what they saw, dived again with exceeding suddenness’.

The chaos abruptly ceased. The ducks swam ashore and slept: ‘There are hours of which it can be said, “Thought was not: in enjoyment it expired.” So it was now, and if anything stirred in the mind at all, it was an echo of the words, “And God saw that it was good.” ’