Samtente Vienne

The velvet scoter (Melanitta fusca) is a sea duck reaching a body length of roughly 51 to 58 centimetres, making it the largest of the European scoters. The drake is predominantly velvet-black with a conspicuous white spot under the eye and a heavy bill marked with extensive yellow-orange along the sides. The female is dark brown and shows two rather diffuse pale patches on each side of the head, one between bill and eye and another behind the eye. Both sexes carry a rectangular white wing speculum, which is often only narrowly visible on swimming birds but flashes unmistakably in flight.

The breeding range of the velvet scoter lies in the northern Palearctic. It extends from Scandinavia and the Fennoscandian peninsula across northern Russia and far into Siberia. Outside the breeding season, the great majority of the European population moves to the Baltic Sea, which is regarded as the most important wintering area for the species. Key sites include the Pomeranian Bay with the Greifswald Bodden, the Gulf of Riga and the Curonian Spit. Estimates suggest that around a quarter of the world population spends the winter in the German part of the Baltic. Numbers have fallen sharply since the 1990s, with the European wintering population dropping from roughly one million to about 373,000 birds. The IUCN therefore classifies the velvet scoter as Vulnerable, and in Germany it is listed on the Red List of breeding birds.

For hunters in Germany, Austria and Switzerland the velvet scoter is a species that is essentially never met in everyday hunting practice, since it remains almost exclusively far offshore on the open sea. In Germany it falls under hunting law but is protected year-round and may not be hunted, and in Austria and Switzerland it is likewise fully protected. The main threats are bycatch in coastal gillnet fisheries, oil pollution and disturbance at staging sites. When identifying birds in the field, particular care is needed to avoid confusion with the slightly smaller common scoter (Melanitta nigra). The decisive features are the white wing speculum, the white spot below the eye of the drake and the absence of a knob on the bill, features that the common scoter does not show. Flocks of sea ducks resting along the coast should therefore consistently be excluded from the shooting field and approached only after unambiguous identification.