A Night Out With: Eider Duck

If you want to glimpse an eider, the duck whose rare down fills the loftiest, most etheral (and most expensive) comforters and pillows on earth, you have to go to Iceland, or at least Northumberland, Britain, where they're lured into nests by kindly and enterprising eiderdown farmers. Unless you happen to frequent a secret corner at a certain zoo in the Midwest.

Sleeper caught up with a female King Eider spinning placidly in the Puffin Coast. Was the reclusive dam hiding from luxury pillow makers? "We keep a couple of eiders here to mix it up a little with the puffins," a source close to the bird explained. (The eider declined to comment for this blog.) "When you have a habitat like this one [the Coast is a new, climate-controlled exhibit, worthy of a celebrity], if there's another species that thrives in it, well, we like to let it."

The eider kept floating away into the shadows, but I managed to get a look at the feathers. From even a few steps away, she looked to be a solid, unobtrusive pale brown, but up close her coloring was exquisite: fine striations of black among many shades of fawn, darker mocha, and chestnut. The pattern was clear and regular, and the feathers soft; the effect was like the finest tweed at Cesare Attolini in Naples.

And was the eider fluffy? Oh, yes, she was fluffy. You can tell from even my paparazzi shot how incredibly round this duck is. In person she looked to be the springiest, yet also most satiny, bird in creation.

There's no danger of a cashmere-goat-type fate awaiting her.* Eiderdown farming is humane. The ducks pluck their own inner down to line their nests, and it is harvested after the chicks hatch. There simply isn't enough eiderdown to ever meet any increased demand for the stuff. No wonder this King Eider's air of... privileged startlement?

After my Frette nightmare, it was a true spiritual correction to spend the evening in the company of this bird. Eider ducks make possible a sleep that surely cannot be enhanced by brand. That make you forget the too-shiny (like a badly dry-cleaned wool suit) word "brand." In The Awakening, Kate Chopin writes: "...as she snuggled comfortably beneath the eiderdown, a sense of restfulness invaded her such as she had not known before."

You may never have an eiderdown pillow, but you may, if you're fortunate, and you're passing through St. Louis, and the puffin keepers are interested and agreeable, be able to pet this bird.

* You haven't taken a moment to consider the bald goats shivering all over the planet in this, the Era of Cheap Cashmere?