Eisente Upper Austria

The long-tailed duck (Clangula hyemalis) is a sea duck reaching a body length of roughly 39 to 47 centimetres. In winter plumage the drake shows a predominantly white head with a dark cheek patch, a dark breast and conspicuously elongated, pin-like central tail feathers. The female remains an inconspicuous brownish-black throughout the year. Unusually among ducks the species moults three times a year. The long-tailed duck is a very active and capable diver, taking its food, mainly mussels and small crustaceans, from considerable depths.

Breeding grounds are circumpolar in the arctic tundra, stretching from Alaska across the Canadian Archipelago and Greenland through Scandinavia to northern Siberia. The species has the northernmost breeding range of any duck. Outside the breeding season the birds concentrate along the coasts of the temperate and subarctic zones. The Baltic Sea is one of the most important wintering quarters worldwide, with estimates of several million individuals spending the winter there. In German Baltic waters the birds arrive from late autumn onwards and return to their Siberian breeding grounds in spring.

For hunters in Germany, Austria and Switzerland the long-tailed duck is a species that is essentially never encountered in everyday hunting practice, since as a pelagic sea duck it rests almost exclusively on the open sea. It is fully protected year-round in Switzerland and Austria, and across most German states it is one of those waterfowl that fall under hunting law but are not actually a quarry species. Wintering numbers in the Baltic have declined drastically since the 1990s, which led the IUCN to list the species as vulnerable. A major threat is bycatch in coastal gillnet fisheries. Anyone hunting on the coast in winter should therefore consistently exclude flocks of long-tailed ducks from the shooting field and ensure unambiguous identification before any shot is even considered.