Tufted Ducks © Phil Jones
The Tufted Duck is separated ecologically from other diving ducks by having a largely carnivorous diet, mainly molluscs. They find most of their food on the bottom of lakes, and some rivers, up to 5 m deep, diving frequently, typically twice a minute for 15-20 seconds at a time, although males dive deeper than females and stay submerged for longer than females (Owen et al 1986).
Despite these apparently quite precise requirements wintering Tufted Ducks are widespread in the county, appearing on almost one-third of tetrads, twice as many as Pochard. They achieve this largely by being able to exploit smaller waters: more than 30% of birds were on ponds or small waterbodies, and 9% of records were on flowing waters, rivers and canals. The largest flock in the county, up to 500 Tufted Ducks, is at Woolston, often on the river Mersey rather than on the dredging deposit beds themselves. As with Pochard, Tufted Ducks seldom use our estuaries.
Tufted Ducks breeding in Scotland mostly move to Ireland for the winter, with a small proportion to our area as well; by contrast, those from southern England largely stay within England, with some flying to the Netherlands and some cold-weather movements to Ireland (Migration Atlas). The behaviour of the breeding birds and their offspring from Cheshire and Wirral, lying in between, is not known. Most of the Tufted Ducks in Britain in the winter are visitors from more northerly latitudes in Fennoscandia and European Russia. A bird ringed as a chick in Latvia in 1977 was shot in Cheshire in January 1982, and adult birds trapped at Rostherne have been reported from as far north as Lapland and as far east as the River Ob at 65ºE, beyond the Ural mountains in Siberia (Wall 1982). One bird ringed at Rostherne was recovered in Iceland; Icelandic breeding birds mainly winter in Ireland, but some mix with the others in Britain. Once here, birds may well move around between sites, but two-thirds of known movements within a winter are short-distance, less than 20 km (Migration Atlas).
The British wintering population of Tufted Duck has been increasingly slightly for many years, and is now around 90,100 birds (Banks et al 2006). Nowhere in the county holds nationally important numbers, only Woolston coming at all close with figures of 600-700 birds. Other sites with three-figure winter counts during this Atlas included Rostherne Mere (SJ78M), the Chelford SQs (SJ87B), Redesmere (SJ87K), the Cholmondeley Meres (SJ55K), Frodsham Marsh (SJ57E), Pickmere (SJ67Y) and Astbury Mere (SJ86L), and flocks at Doddington Pool (SJ74D) and Tabley Mere (SJ77I) numbered in the nineties. Half of the mapped tetrads held groups smaller than ten birds, however: Bell’s statement still holds good, that numbers of Tufted Ducks are seldom as large as the Pochard flocks (Bell 1962).
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