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Red-Breasted Merganser | Mergus serrator
Middelste zaagbek | Serreta mediana
The Red-breasted Merganser is a slim fish-eating duck with a thin, red, serrated bill and a ragged double crest. Within the region it is a winter visitor to shallow coastal waters, mainly along the Mediterranean from Tunisia to the Levant.
Voice
Almost silent outside the breeding season. In display at the end of winter the male gives a soft, cat-like jee-ow, the female a harsh krrok-krrok.
Recording: Stanislas Wroza — CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 · converted to mono · xeno-canto
Identification
About 55 cm, elongated and low in the water, with a long, thin, red bill with a small hook at the tip. The male has a green-black head with a ragged crest, a white collar, a rufous, dark-spotted breast, black-and-white scapulars and finely grey-vermiculated flanks. Females and juveniles are grey with a rusty-brown head and crest that merges without a sharp border into the pale throat and neck. In flight fast and direct, with a white speculum crossed by two black bars in the male.
Confusion species
The Goosander (Mergus merganser) is very rare in the region; it is larger and heavier, the female with a sharp border between the rufous neck and white breast and a clear-cut white chin, the male with a white, salmon-tinged breast and flanks. A winter Great Crested Grebe (Podiceps cristatus) can resemble a female merganser at distance, but has a whiter face, a pink bill and a slimmer, upright neck.
Habitat
Shallow salt and brackish waters: bays, harbours, lagoons, estuaries and tidal channels, usually close inshore. It dives in small groups for small fish, often cooperatively, and swims with the head submerged to search.
Where the bird is most at home, classified by the habitats of North Africa and the Middle East.
Range and movements
A winter visitor along the Mediterranean coast of Tunisia, especially in the Gulf of Gabès and the Bizerte lagoons, and further along the coasts of Libya, Egypt (mainly Lake Bardawil and the Delta lagoons), Israel, Lebanon and Syria; scarce along the Mediterranean and Atlantic coasts of Morocco and in Algeria. On the Persian Gulf a scarce winter visitor to Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates, and a vagrant in Oman and on the Red Sea. Beyond the region it breeds from Iceland and the British Isles to Siberia and North America, wintering along the coasts of Europe, east Asia and North America.
- Winter visitor (c. Apr–Sep)
- dark = core range, pale = thinly spread
How and when to look
In winter watch from harbour moles and sea walls along the Tunisian coast or at Lake Bardawil for small groups diving one after another. The birds are shy; a telescope and a calm day help a great deal.
Conservation status
Not threatened and stable over much of its range. Sensitive to bycatch in gill nets, oil pollution and disturbance in lagoons and harbours.
Scientific name
Mergus serrator | Linnaeus, 1758
Linnaeus described the species in 1758 and placed it straight away in the genus where it still stands. He introduced the genus Mergus in that same work. Mergus is the Latin word for an unidentified waterbird mentioned by Pliny the Elder and other authors; some have taken it to be a cormorant or Scopoli's shearwater. serrator is Latin for 'sawyer', from serra 'saw', after the saw-like teeth along the bill with which the bird grips slippery fish. The specimen the first description was based on came from Sweden.