Most waterfowlers will only dream about shooting a king eider, and those that do often travel to the frozen ends of the earth and weather sub-zero temps at sea to get it done. But back in October, an avid duck hunter from South Dakota saved himself the lengthy, bucket-list trip when he shot the first king eider ever confirmed in the Mount Rushmore State.
Mike Twedt was returning home from a sandhill crane hunt with his son Micheal on October 27 when they decided to stop over at a local waterfowl production area, the hunter tells Field & Stream. He walked the marsh edge with his dog Harley, hoping to flush a few pheasants, while Micheal stalked a group of drake pintails clustered on a sandbar nearby. “I looked over towards Micheal and saw something on the water that kind of looked like a speckle belly goose,” Twedt says. “It was much bigger than any of the ducks we’re used to seeing around here.”
Twedt put a sneak on the strange bird, and when it flushed, he dropped it with a 60-yard shot across the marsh. “Once Harley brought it back, I thought maybe it was a common eider or some kind of crazy hybrid,” Twedt says, “but a king eider was the furthest thing from my mind.”
On the car ride home, Micheal scoured google for king eider images. His search eventually turned up a photo of an immature drake that looked exactly like the bird his dad had just shot. Unlike mature drake king eiders—unmistakable when fully plumed—young-of-the-year drakes are more drab in color, closely resembling a hen. All the same, they're extremely rare if not completely unheard of in the wetlands of South Dakota. “I’ve heard reports of people spotting common eiders around here, but never any king eider,” Twedt says. “We knew if Micheal's I.D. was correct that this bird was rare—and it was a long way from home.”
Orin Robinson is a quantitative ecologist at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology. At Cornell, Robinson helps manage eBird.org, the world's largest birding database where millions of users from across the globe document and record their bird encounters. “There are no e-bird records over the last 20 years of a king eider even being spotted in South Dakota," Robinson tells F&S. "There are records in Minnesota, North Dakota, Iowa, and Wyoming, but they are very, very rare."
According to Ducks Unlimited, the king eider's western migration corridor extends from the coast of Alaska to the Adelaide Peninsula in Canada. In the East, they travel between islands in the Hudson Bay and the western coast of Greenland. Western populations typically winter along the Alaska Peninsula and Aleutian Islands, and eastern king eiders head for southern Greenland, Labrador, and Newfoundland when the sea ice sets in. Some waterfowlers will travel to Alaska to hunt them in the Bering Sea while others go all the way to Greenland.
Mike Brasher, a senior scientist with DU and the host of the Ducks Unlimited Podcast, says Twedt's eider could have been taken off course for a variety of reasons, but the young bird's lack of travel experience is one likely culprit. "First-year birds have no experience migrating to their wintering destinations," Brasher tells F&S. "But the fact that we don't see more occurrences like this, given that lack of migratory experience, is pretty fascinating. It shows that these birds tend to have a pre-programed understanding of where they want to go. "
Robinson says that almost all of the king eiders spotted outside the sea duck's typical range and recorded on ebird.org were either first-year males or hens. "The one vagrant king eider that I've seen was in Barnegat Bay in New Jersey, and it was a female with a big raft of common eiders," he says. "We do get two or three reports in Lake Ontario every year, but that group follows the St. Lawrence in, which kind of makes sense. This one in South Dakota doesn't make a whole lot of sense."
Brasher says major storms can blow sea ducks off course. He also speculates that Twedt's eider could have followed a band of migrating snow geese into South Dakota. "King eiders in the central Arctic will breed in association with snow geese," he says. "It could have gotten wrapped up and associated with a snow goose colony that started migrating down through South Dakota, or it could have been off course from the beginning—who knows? But I would have to guess that the central Arctic is the most likely population for that bird to have originated in."
Read Next: Clemson University Student Takes Stunning Mandarin Duck on Public Land
Whatever the reason for the eider's unlikely presence in South Dakota, both Twedt and his son say they'll cherish the memory of the once-in-a-lifetime hunt for years to come. "I don't know if he flew south with that flock of pintails that Micheal was after that day or what, but the fact that we just happened to be in the right place at the right time was pretty special for us," says Twedt, who plans to have the rare bird mounted. "I think Micheal was even more excited about it than I was."
