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Fairbanks’ 17-year-old bird watching wonder, Nick Hadjukovich, added another feather to his cap last week.

Hadjukovich spotted a tufted duck in a pond at the end of South Cushman Street on Friday. It was the first tufted duck sighting recorded in the Interior, according to Dan Gibson, ornithology collections manager for the University of Alaska museum.

“I was on my usual routine around town,” said Hadjukovich, who makes an almost daily loop around to Fairbanks’ birding hot spots during the peak of the migration to search for interesting and unusual birds.

“I just picked it out of a flock of canvasbacks,” he said.

Tufted ducks breed across Eurasia, from Iceland to the Kamchatka Peninsula in Siberia, and look similar to ring-necked ducks and scaup. There are no breeding records of tufted ducks in North America. They are a regular visitor to western Alaska and are sometimes seen on the east and west coast of the U.S.

Hadjukovich, who is considered one of Fairbanks’ most astute birders despite his young age, said the bird’s white wing flanks and a conspicuous ponytail-like tuft on the back of its head gave it away.

“It was pretty obvious,” said Hadjukovich, who was using a spotting scope to scan the ponds.

Hadjukovich took pictures of the bird through his spotting scope, and though they were not good enough quality to run in the paper, the bird is definitely identifiable.

Nancy DeWitt, another Fairbanks birding authority, was among a cluster of about a dozen local birders who flocked to the South Cushman Ponds to get a glimpse of the tufted duck when she got word that it was there.

“When you hear there’s a bird like that in town you just run,” said DeWitt, who added the bird to her life list. “We got really good views of it with the (spotting) scope. It was kind of snoozing with its head down so you to watch it for awhile to see it lift its head up every now and then.”

This is the second time in three years that Hadjukovich has recorded an Interior birding first. Three years ago, he and friend Luke Decico spotted and photographed a marbled godwit at the float ponds on the east ramp of Fairbanks International Airport.

“It’s a really good bird,” Hadjukovich said.

He watched the bird for about three hours on Friday and returned to the same spot Saturday but it was nowhere to be seen, even though the flock of canvasbacks it was with were still there.

“It’s too bad it didn’t stick around longer for some other people ot see it,” DeWitt said.