The alarm bells went off when the male barely distanced himself from people. “We are in such a bird watcher app group on Texel, where we read that the water bird was on the side and that we could easily get to it,” says Jarco Havermans of Ecomare.
When the bird keepers took a look at the Texel crowd favorite on Sunday, it turned out that he had a wet head and back. “That means his fur is no longer waterproof. He was also seriously weakened. He even sat motionless when we tried to grab him.”
Import-Texelaar
The spectacled leader, which normally lives in the northern parts of Alaska and Siberia, has been on Texel for some time. The sea duck was seen in the Netherlands for the first time in January this year. “He managed to handle himself well here,” says Havermans. “He also spent the summer here, but normally they live on pack ice. That is very different from Texel.”
The male is the first spectacled bearer to be identified in the Netherlands. Yet at Ecomare they see that birds from Asia or Africa often end up here. “This is just not their normal habitat, so it often doesn’t end well for them.”