Laura Erickson’s For the Birds

This beautiful duck is chiefly a bird of the western montane region of North America; it was once referred to as the “Rocky Mountain Goldeneye.” I saw my lifer in August 1979 in Yellowstone National Park; I’ve also seen them in California, Alaska, and British Columbia, as well as Duluth, Minnesota and Superior, Wisconsin, hanging out with Common Goldeneyes.

Barrow’s Goldeneyes also have a small, disjunct nesting population in eastern Canada and another in Iceland, which is where the species was first collected and described for science by German naturalist Johann Friedrich Gmelin in 1789; he gave it the specific epithet islandica for Iceland. This may seem odd to us Americans, but Gmelin named it before Europeans were doing much exploring in western America—the Lewis and Clark Expedition didn’t begin for another 15 years, and they never saw a Barrow’s Goldeneye.

Barrow’s Goldeneyes are common around Lake Mývatn in northern Iceland, where local people have traditionally created nest boxes for them on the sides of their homes and barns, explaining the local name for the species, húsönd, which means house duck. The origin of the Iceland population is unknown—the species isn’t known for vagrancy. Barrow’s Goldeneyes are rare but local on the coast of Greenland, but there are only a handful of records of them wandering as far as Scotland, and nowhere else in Europe.

A great many Barrow’s Goldeneyes died in the aftermath of the March 1989 Exxon Valdez oil spill because so many of them winter in shallow mussel beds along the Alaskan coast.