The male is black with a white marking, while the female has pale patches on the head. It breeds in northern Europe and uses coastal waters in winter.
The male is black with a small white crescent below the eye. The female has pale patches on both sides of the head, and the white wing panel is visible in flight.
Velvet scoters wintering in the Baltic can show bottom phases clustered around forty seconds even when diving deeper. Among birds using sandy and muddy seabeds off Lithuania, total dive duration increased with depth, while the time spent at the bottom was comparatively consistent.
Depth-recording devices sampled every second on five birds in December 2021 and two other birds in March 2022. The combined dataset contained 21,679 dives, with the deepest reaching 36 metres. Some birds mainly used shallow water, while others used depths of 20–36 metres, revealing individual differences in the depths exploited.
At depths greater than five metres down to about 23 metres, bottom time averaged approximately 44 seconds. Total time from submergence to resurfacing increased with depth, averaging about 86 seconds at 25–30 metres. Each dive combines time at the bottom with the descent from the surface and the ascent back to it.
An extinction-risk assessment has not been added yet.
For the population breeding in western Siberia and northern Europe and wintering in northwestern Europe, reducing accidental capture in fishing nets is a conservation priority. The international action plan adopted in 2018 calls for developing and testing seabird-friendly fishing gear. It also recommends temporary restrictions on gill and trammel nets at key sites while birds are present, unless effective alternative mitigation is in use, together with collection of bycatch and fishing-effort data.