Tag: nature

This dapper duck is a male Steller’s Eider (Polysticta stelleri), a bird that breeds in far north Arctic regions and winters in what, to our way of thinking, are locations that are just as chilly (Aleutian Islands, northern Scandinavia, and the like).

This species is named after Georg Wilhelm Steller, a physician, naturalist, and explorer who introduced Western scientists to a variety of animals (and also endured a shipwreck and survived months on an island now called Bering Island while saving fellow crew members from dying of scurvy).

Steller had a menagerie of animals named after him in addition to this sea duck: a jay, a sea eagle, a sea lion, a sculpin, and a sea cow, and that’s just the ones in which he appears in common names. (Sadly, the Steller’s sea cow was hunted to extinction within a few decades of its being described by Steller.)

But with eponymous bird names giving way to new titles, what could the Steller’s Eider be called instead?

Well, the Finnish people have a word for it that actually reflects a modern supposition about the species’ genetics: Allihaahka (alli is “Long-Tailed Duck,” haahka is “eider”). According to one study, Steller’s Eider may be a species that evolved via “hybrid speciation,” a long-ago “gene flow” between two different kinds of birds. But it seems unlikely this name would catch on in North America. Nor would its German name, Scheckente, “piebald duck,” referring to its bold black and white markings (which reflects its scientific name, too: polustiktos means “many spotted” in Greek).

This eider is known as a “soldier duck” in Alaska for its habit of swimming in single file, but the name that really stands out in literature about the far north is the Inupiat name Igniquaqtuq. This name is inspired by the golden sheen on the duck’s belly and breast and is translated variously as “the duck that sat in the campfire,” “duck that sat in fire,” and “the bird who travels with fire” (this site has wonderful information about indigenous names for birds). And so this sea duck could glory in the terrific rhyming name Fire Eider.

It would be in good company with other birds whose markings gave rise to legends involving fire. In Iroquois lore, for example, the American Robin once had a pure white breast, but because it saved a man from freezing to death by carrying a live coal and kindling to start a campfire and then tended it by fanning it with its wings, its feathers first became spotted and then turned rusty red–a wonderful summary of the actual bird’s transition from a polka-dotted youngster to a red-breasted adult.

Likewise, in European lore, the European Robin fanned embers to warm the baby Jesus and thus burned its feathers forever red. (In another story, the red is a bloodstain caused by the bird’s efforts to pluck merciless thorns from Jesus’s crown on Golgotha.)

None of the other eiders have eponymous names. One splendidly marked species bears the royal name King Eider, a goggle-faced species is aptly named Spectacled Eider, and the third is the Common Eider. The Common Eider in this photos appears to be giving some side-eye about being called “common.”