Stejneger's scoter, Lower Largo

I was a bit gutted a couple of weeks ago when a Stejneger's scoter turned up in Fife and a grey-headed lapwing in Northumberland just two days after I returned from a week in Lothian. I mean how unlucky was that? I've been doing a lot of driving for work recently and just couldn't muster the enthusiasm to drive all the way back again having just returned home especially since I had another long drive scheduled for the following week. To be honest I wasn't too bothered about the grey-headed lapwing, but the Stejneger's scoter which was hanging around in the company of two white-winged scoter, a surf scoter and a few hundred each of common and velvet scoter was a different matter. That one really hurt because I have experience of just how good that part of Scotland is for sea ducks, yet still I just couldn't face adding another 500 miles to my busy schedule. So I'd given up hope of experiencing the scoter bonanza, at least for this spring. That was until yesterday evening when I received a message from a friend asking if I would be interested in joining him on a trip to Fife the following day. I immediately agreed, it was a scoter lifeline!

We arrived at Lower Largo at 9:45am to be told that the scoter had been showing well up to an hour ago but had then been flushed much further out by a kayaker and two canoes. Great! A quick scan of the sea immediately confirmed our worst fears, it was now going to be very difficult be to pick out anything at all. There were certainly a couple of thousand scoter on the sea but 90% of them were dots, hardly conducive to identifying birds which relied on us having a good look at their head shape and bill structure in order to identify them. It was almost impossible to distinguish velvets from common let alone white-winged from Stejneger's. 

Some birds were closer though, and after a short while we picked out a 2cy drake surf scoter in amongst the closer velvets. That at least gave us hope, yet we knew that in reality surf scoter was the easiest of all the scoter species to identify at distance. What chance a Stejneger's at that distance? To be honest, I'd given up hope almost from the moment we arrived and saw how far out the majority of the scoter where, but we were here now so I told myself to be positive and keep going. We continued on our way east and after about a mile we came across a group of birders looking intently out to sea.

Miraculously they had located the Stejneger's and it was one of the closest birds offshore. Still probably 800m away but it was easy to pick out with it's large head, "Roman nose" profile and I could even clearly see the bulbous "Rhinoceros" bill which is unique to this species. It seemed that we should be able to get closer so we followed a footpath into the dunes and got to within perhaps 500m of the birds and now it wasn't a bad view at all. We watched it for 15 minutes during which time I could see not only the shape of the bill but also the pinky-red colour towards the tip, while the white tick behind the eye was also prominent. 

The birds started to drift further away and there was the beginnings of a heat haze forming which didn't help, but ultimately none of that mattered because presumably the same two canoes came back and went right through the near flock again sending them flying right out to sea where they joined the other dots. To make matters worse the light was now starting to work against us, and it seemed that we were unlikely to get better views than we had already had, so we decided it was time to move on. We hadn't seen the white-winged scoter, but I have seen that species on several previous occasions at Musselborough and given the difficulties of distance and disturbance today, we had to count ourselves fortunate to have seen the Stejneger's which was after all the main species we wanted to see. Just how lucky we were was confirmed the following day when there was negative news of the Stejneger's and to the best of my knowledge it's not been seen since.

 

Stejneger's scoter brings my UK life list to 441.

It was actually a decent scope view of the Stejneger's, but the best I could manage in the way of photos were these video grabs which aren't great but are good enough to show the head detail of the bird. The head is large with the "Roman nose" profile similar to eider, the bill has the distinctive lump and the white tick is prominent and extends above the eye. Velvet has a much more concave bill shape, whereas white-winged has a three-tiered, two stepped profile.