Some birdwatchers had already predicted that the spectacled leader would show up again on Texel. “He probably never left,” says Marc Plomp of the Texel Bird Information Center.
The last detection of the spectacled leader was in June this year near De Cocksdorp. Then the duck was moulting and lost some of its plumage. “In the summer they molt from a beautiful male plumage to a kind of female plumage,” says Plomp. “And then they turn completely brown.”
Hundreds of their kind
This makes them resemble many eider ducks floating in the Wadden Sea. The spectacle leader is then hardly noticeable. “There are hundreds of similar species,” says Plomp. “And they go swimming a little further out to sea. So the duck was barely visible from the dike. And when they sleep on a slab of stone, no one sees them.”
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