Endangered
Scaly-sided Merganser
Mergus squamatus
The scaly-sided merganser or Chinese merganser is an endangered typical merganser (genus Mergus).
Appearance
This striking sea duck has a thin red bill and a scaled dark pattern on the flanks and rump. Both sexes have a crest of wispy elongated feathers, reaching almost to the shoulders in adult males and being fairly short in females and immatures. The adult male has a black head and neck, white breast and underparts, and blackish mantle and wings, except for the white innerwings.
Published measurements include mass about 985.
Range and habitat
No country pin is stored for Scaly-sided Merganser on this catalog. That is a missing field, not proof the animal has no range.
Pins are Wikidata “endemic to” fields. Orange dots, when present, are GBIF occurrence tiles — survey bias included.
Diet and breeding
Their breeding habitat is rivers in primary forest in the southeastern Russian Far East, perhaps in North Korea, and in two locations Changbai Mountains and small isolated location in Lesser Xingan Mtns. In northeastern China. The bulk of the species' population breed in Russian Far East (85%) and Changbaishan both in China and DPRK M. Squamatus are migratory, wintering in central and southern China, with small numbers in Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, northern Vietnam, Myanmar and Thailand.
Birds tend to move upriver during the day, both when startled and when foraging. The latter is probably because stirred-up sediments will alert and hide prey downstream. Often the birds dive for prey, repeatedly submerging for a quarter-to half-minute with only a few seconds pause between dives.
In crisis
The scaly-sided merganser or Chinese merganser is an endangered typical merganser (genus Mergus). Winter ecology and conservation threats to the scaly-sided merganser were reported in 2012. Threats include sand mining, fishing, riparian vegetation destruction, habitat fragmentation, and water pollution.
Recommended conservation measures include provision of artificial nest boxes, informing local residents of the merganser's status, fishing regulation, protection of critical habitat, controlling recreation on breeding rivers and the raising of domestic ducks in areas where the mergansers winter, management of hydrology in ways that protect and benefit the merganser, and annual population surveys at key breeding rivers.
Scaly-sided Merganser is Endangered on this catalog because that is the IUCN category stored on Wikidata. Confirm the official criteria and any later count on iucnredlist.org.
Sources
Written for this catalog from the English Wikipedia article on Scaly-sided Merganser, Wikidata item Q495159. Family and order context is original field-guide writing about the group, not a copied assessment of this one species. Wikipedia text is CC BY-SA. Not an IUCN assessment. Counts, when quoted, can change — confirm them on the recovery programme and on iucnredlist.org.
