Tweeters:

I was most impressed by the weblinks someone sent with photos of large
Baikal Teal flocks photographed in Korea. Apparently the species at one
time was similarly abundant in Japan. Various authors have mentioned that
its numbers are variable year to year, although I had not been aware of the
apparent recent uptick.

I checked my sources on Baikal Teal in the Russian Far East last night. In
my 90s travels I found it to be a tough bird to find, finding just a couple
pairs in migration (Falcated Duck was a different matter altogether).
Vitaly Nechaev at the Vlad branch of the Academy of Sciences told me back in
'96 that the problem was that hunting by throw-nets in coastal areas of n.
China had dramatically impacted Baikal Teal numbers, and that the species
had sharply declined. In his checklist of birds of the Primoriye (the
mainland territory bordering N. Korea, 1999), he lists Baikal Teal as a rare
migrant and summer visitor. Similarly, his comprehensive book on birds of
Sakhalin (1991), lists the bird as a rare migrant and cites individual
summer records. The status was the same moving north: Babenko, in his book
on Birds of the lower Amur Basin (1999, including most of the Khabarovksii
Krai), lists the bird as a rare migrant and rarer summer visitor. Both
Lobkov (Nesting Birds of Kamchatka, 1986) and Gerasimov et al (checklist of
the birds of the Kamchatka, 1999) also list Baikal Teal as a rare migrant
and rarer summer visitor, the species formerly nested at the north end of
the peninsula and on the adjacent mainland as well. Babenko notes that
according to earlier field reports to as late as the 60s, Baikal Teal was at
times "the most abundant duck species" during migration in the Amur
drainage, with flocks of up to 1000 individuals during passage, like the
numbers shown in the photos on the Korea weblink.

But the problem is that none of these address the last few years, or the
region that holds the core breeding population--Yakutia and nearby regions
in north and east Siberia. There doesn't seem to be that much written on
the birdlife of this vast, remote region, much less something that would
cover the last 2-3 years.

Scott Atkinson
Lake Stevens
mail to: scottratkinson at hotmail.com