Red-breasted Merganser

A brooding Red-breasted Merganser on Hyldeholm off Skuldelev.

The Red-breasted Merganser breeds significantly later in the summer than the fjord´s other breeding birds. It hides its nest in, for example, tall vegetation. On Hyldeholm off Skuldelev there was for many years an extremely dense colony with over 25 nests, where the birds used the thick vegetation as cover, but after the arrival of both rats and stoats, with their young, the colony is much reduced. It is however still the area around Hyldeholm and Kølholm which is home to the greatest number of Red-breasted Merganser. In the late summer you can see so-called “nurseries”, where a single female is in charge of a flock of 25-50 young - far more than she herself has hatched.

Because of the difficulty of counting the breeding population of Red-breasted Merganser, we do not give a population growth graph for it as this would not give a true picture. The autumn and winter populations vary considerably, with a maximum of just over 200 in autumn and less than 100 in winter.


Day-old chicks.

Red-breasted Merganser - population trends