It is one thing to lose your ain immature very early on and then — at a weak moment — prefer young of another species that resemble your lost immature. Adoption subsequently hatching is an inherently risky move, and one probable to saddle you with the responsibleness of rearing young very unlike yourself.

Simply how can things go sideways when you spend four long weeks on a nest and notice advisedly equally young sally from the eggs you warmed with your own body? Surely any animal that fights its style out of an egg that you lot take incubated lovingly beneath y'all for then long must be worthy of your protection.

And then it must take seemed to a breeding loon pair in northwestern Montana 2 days ago when iii fluffy youngsters hatched and dutifully followed their parents onto the water. Still the fluffy youngsters that popped out of the eggs the loon parents had spent countless hours incubating were not loon chicks, simply Canada Goose goslings. And so those common cold nights, scorching afternoons, and relentless flying pests that the parents endured for 4 long weeks take produced a surprising outcome.

The loon parents exercise non seem disappointed. They have spent the past two days attending untiringly to their adorable, if unexpected, brood. And the goslings themselves betray no hint of alarm or discomfort — even when their parents vanish suddenly beneath the lake'south surface.

But Bob LeBlanc, the lensman who discovered this mismatched family, was left scratching his head. Later hearing him recount the story of how a loon pair ended upward with three goslings, I could shed no new light on the state of affairs.

Certain facts seem clear. First, a goose pair nested on one of Bob's three advisedly synthetic (for loons) nesting platforms but then inexplicably abandoned a clutch of eggs soon after incubation began. Finding an attractive nesting location, a later-arriving pair of loons apparently skipped the footstep where they deposit their own eggs there and instead simply decided to warm the eggs already on the platform.

I'll be honest. As someone who has devoted his terminal 3 decades to learning about common loons and promoting their conservation, I have decidedly mixed feelings nigh loons raising goslings. The Canada Goose population in the Upper Midwest does non need loons to enhance more of them. In fact, according to a contempo study, at that place are about v times as many geese in North America at present than in 1970. Goose numbers go along to ascension in the Upper Midwest, where I do my research, leading me to worry that they are seizing good nest spots and keeping loons from using them. Simply for the moment, and in this one loon family, I have to acknowledge that the fuzzy misfits are awfully cute.

Three days ago, Allison and I had but one car, so we covered a double excursion of lakes. We loaded two solo canoes precariously on top of our '07 Toyota Corolla — "That seems rubber", I said, tugging on one of the straps nosotros had used to lash the boats to the roof rack and grinning reassuringly at my dubious daughter — and headed to a northern tier of lakes. I dropped her and her canoe at Brandy, and scurried across Highway 51 to Arrowhead. An hour and half subsequently I covered Kawaguesaga-Northward, while she observed at Bullhead, and and so forth throughout the day. It was tiring, and Allison inevitably had to wait ten minutes or so for me to drive back from my lake to hers, but we visited four sets of lakes this way. Covering many lakes with limited personnel is central to the ethos of the Loon Project, and I was delighted to walk the walk on Sunday.

While our highly fuel-efficient observations on our last day in the field were very cool, the portrait of reproductive success that emerged from the lakes I visited was decidedly cryptic. The Hodstradt pair has two thriving, five-week-old chicks. During my visit, the ten-twelvemonth-former female (hatched on Butternut Lake in Wood Canton) was struggling to provide plenty nutrient for her large family. The alpha chick begged her mercilessly and received 14 feedings. In contrast, the beta chick, which simply got ii food items, was on the receiving end of iii harsh pecks from his larger sibling. Still, Hodstradt has a history of producing two-chick broods, and so they appear to stand a good chance of fledging both young.

In contrast to the thriving family at Hodstradt, the Arrowhead breeding pair has been impacted heavily by a wing injury to the male person. Fifty-fifty every bit I began to pull the canoe off of the Loonmobile, I saw a large loon preening awkwardly forty meters off the Arrowhead boat landing. "Uh-oh", I idea. The telltale drooping of his right wing revealed the male's identity long before I observed his plastic leg bands. He was alarm and responsive to his environment, but he looked worse than 10 days earlier, when we had captured him at night and inspected his injured right fly. I sighed and shook my head; we had hoped he would recover and rejoin his mate and chicks. As I took annotation of his struggle to preen without stretching his damaged fly, his sodden feather (which occurs when loons fail to embrace themselves with protective oil from a special gland well-nigh their tail), and his willingness to permit a fisherman to drift to within x meters, a grim realization striking me. This male is going downhill speedily and is not going to recover. (Marge Gibson, a veterinarian with REGI, has inspected a series of photos taken by Linda, and is confident that the right wing is cleaved — probably at the humerus — an injury she has seen often after severe blunt-force trauma such as a strike by a motorboat or jetski.) Despite the male person's injury, I wondered why he was confining himself to the small, protected cove off of the boat ramp, instead of remaining in the primary body of the lake.

I quickly learned why the wounded male was hiding. A pair of loons rested confidently on the southwestern end of the chief bay. Dissimilar the injured bird, these two sat upward high on the lake surface. A short time later, they foraged in plain view in the eye of the lake. In other words, they acted like they owned the place. Clearly the male person had taken refuge in a protected cove in guild to hide from these 2 new adults that, in the absenteeism of territory defense, had laid claim to the lake. Indeed, the new pair swam e to the mouth of the male's cove as I observed them, as if hunting an intruder they wished to drive from the lake. I was relieved that neither pair member gave any sign that they detected the injured male in the cove. Somehow — either by diving oft, hiding nether a dock, or mayhap pulling himself upward onto the shore — he eluded them and spared himself their attacks.

The wounded male was non the only loon systematically fugitive the new convenance pair at Arrowhead. Every bit I patrolled the shoreline of the lake, I found his mate foraging madly for one of their two chicks in the northeastern section. Though her territory has slipped away because of her mate'due south and her own inability to defend information technology, the female person has been unwilling to desert her seven-calendar week-old chicks. In order to avoid the watchful eyes of the new pair, she and the banded chick I institute her with ever remained within x meters of shore and foraged among a stretch of long docks that jut out from the northeastern shoreline. As my video above shows, the chick begged his mother relentlessly for food, while she captured what few modest fishes and insect larvae she could find along this sandy stretch. This cursory set of observations provided a window onto the female's plight. In order to fledge her ii chicks, she must provision them surreptitiously for at least some other month, expect for them to learn to fly, and so hope that they can motility to nearby undefended lakes (which chicks naturally do at this age), where they can complete the growth process. The series of practise runs, aborted takeoffs, and awkward landings necessary for a chick to become adept at flight are sure to draw the attention of and aggression from the new breeding pair. If, by some quirk or phenomenon, the female manages to continue the chicks prophylactic and healthy until they can fly, she volition be the start adult we have ever seen to lose her mate when the chicks were younger than 5 weeks, have a new breeding pair have possession of the territory, yet all the same manage to fledge them. Every bit much as I respect her decision, I do not like her odds.

Later my study of connected decline of the sometime breeding male from iii days ago, Linda and Kevin Grenzer visited Arrowhead yesterday. They plant the same cast of characters that I had seen two days before — the skulking, incapacitated male, the confident new pair, the plucky former female, and the banded chick that she had been feeding — simply, incredibly, Linda too turned up the unbanded chick that we had non seen on two previous visits and had given upwards for dead. In fact, Linda got a series of photos of this chick every bit it followed its wounded father onto shore (see featured photo at top). It is touching to notice the chick'southward dilemma — sitting awkwardly and reluctantly on country, even so refusing to carelessness its fading father. I guess if we are looking for a positive from the recent events at Arrowhead, it is that the family is doggedly sticking together in the wake of a gut-wrenching cataclysm.

Raising of a child past i parent solitary is common enough in humans that we take words to describe the miracle. Since humans are highly social, rearing of a child by a single parent — and a support network of friends and relatives — can be effective. Not so in loons. The loon convenance system could be called "obligate biparental care", because both male and female are usually required to fledge fifty-fifty a single chick. When i parent is lost during chick-rearing, the typical result is rapid death of the chick or chicks, either because the loon that replaces the dead parent actively attacks them or because they receive much less food and protection from a single parent and perish from other causes. In fact, sustained single-parent loon families simply occur when i parent dies or is evicted and the remaining parent somehow manages to sequester the chick from the new developed that fills the convenance vacancy. The occurrence is rare plenty that I think all of the cases in our study area.

When the Washburn female was injured in 2000, she deserted her family unit and turned her attending to her ain survival. Though it seemed heartless at the time, this conclusion made sense. Even though helping to rear the chick she left in the male'southward care would take increased her reproductive fettle, she was right non to adventure her life for the chick. An adult that sacrifices itself for a chick is throwing abroad many hereafter years of convenance success. After the female left the family, the male spent his time at the northern end of the lake, feeding the chick vigorously when he could. Somehow he managed to fledge it.

In 2006, the Garth male person vanished just afterward the chick hatched, leaving the female alone to raise it. A single loon female parent is in a bind; she lacks the size to intimidate and bulldoze off other loons and ability to give the territorial yodel that could prevent many intruders from landing on her lake in the first place. Instead, single females must tolerate visits past many intruders and promise to keep them away from the chick. A new male person shortly took over Garth and paired with the female. The female person and her new mate seemed to reach some sort of uneasy understanding; she spent time with him, while he neither fed nor attacked his step-chick. The chick, which we banded late in the year and affectionately call "Stripe Hell" because his bands are blue-stripe over taupe-stripe, carmine-stripe over silver, ultimately survived to machismo. In fact, every bit an adult, this male claimed the breeding territory on Lee Lake in 2012 and produced chicks there in 2016 and 2017. Following his eviction from Lee in 2018, this production of a one-parent family settled on South Blueish in 2019 and then resettled on Miller Lake this twelvemonth, where he is now raising a chick with his mate. Plainly having been raised in a single-parent abode does not forbid a loon from leading a successful adult life.

Things practise not always go smoothly for step-chicks. When the male person succumbed to some unknown disquiet on Flannery in 2015, he left his mate alone to fend for their 2-week-quondam chicks. In this instance, the female led the chicks downwardly to Velvet Lake, which attaches to Flannery at its southern end. When a neighboring male took over, he found the chicks and pecked them viciously, killing i and forcing the survivor to hide underneath docks in Velvet to escape his marauding stepfather. This chick never received as much nutrient as a chick normally would; we are not sure if information technology survived the ordeal.

Among the several single-parent families we have recorded in 28 years, Squash-Northwest is perhaps the almost memorable. The Squash-Northwest male in 2012 hatched a chick with his mate simply was injured and died when the chick was two weeks old. Left lonely with a small chick, his mate not only protected and raised it to adulthood, she also establish a new mate. She was able somehow to balance the demands of her ravenous youngster and the male that she paired with — while keeping them physically separated so that the replacement male person did not harm his step-chick. On 1 visit, we would detect her staying shut to the chick, feeding it and fending off eagles at the northwestern terminate; on the next visit, the female would forage and rest with her new mate on southern side of the lake, while the chick hid well-nigh shore a kilometer away. While nosotros marveled at the ability of the female to lead this double life and thus to keep the chick alive, we were on pins and needles during the entire chick-rearing period. It seemed inconceivable that the female person could sustain her balancing act for the many weeks it would take until the chick was old enough to fend for itself. On each visit to the territory, we expected to find that the chick was dead or severely injured post-obit an assail by its stepfather. Yet the fatherless chick, pictured above and dubbed "Miracle Chick", not only survived just grew past leaps and bounds.

This yr we have a new — and increasingly night — variation on the single-mother theme playing out on Arrowhead Lake. About a month ago, the right wing of the 12-year-erstwhile breeding male person became injured. (It is a soft tissue injury, we think, every bit we did not find a break when we inspected the wing after capture a week ago.) The injured male person has engaged less and less with his mate and ii chicks over the past month. Instead he spends his fourth dimension resting and foraging alone on the southern end of the lake. His mate, a seasoned breeder who has produced at least seven sets of chicks with at least three different males on Madeline Lake and Arrowhead, appeared to step up her chick feedings and attendance to compensate for her mate's absence. Her efforts seemed to pay off; the chick we caught a calendar week ago had accomplished a good for you weight, and its sibling (which we did non catch) was of roughly equal size. Only the situation has degenerated in the past week. The male, though still alert and feeding himself, shows no signs of recovery from his wing injury and continues to avoid the family. In the past few days, the half dozen-week-onetime chick that we did not capture was lost (to an eagle, co-ordinate to lake residents). Today, Lyn reported that intruders landing on the lake roamed about it at will, because neither male person nor female showed any semblance of territory defense. It seems merely a affair of time before a new breeding pair takes over Arrowhead, and that will likely lead to the demise of the surviving chick.

Permit's try to be optimistic. If the male recovers and begins to defend the territory again, the chick is in great shape. At half-dozen weeks, it has already survived the nigh difficult early on phase of chick-rearing. The veteran female person is an attentive mother; perhaps her care can keep the chick salubrious in the concurrently. And in the sad issue that the male does not recover, the female's efforts might exist enough to keep the chick live and growing even in the presence of a new male person. Later on all, it has been washed before.

In whatsoever event, I think I have made my signal. Biparental intendance is almost mandatory in common loons. While a human dad or mom can usually call upon a support network of friends and relatives to assist feed and protect their child, a male or female loon that loses its mate during chick-rearing is very much alone.

It is usually no fun to be wrong, but maybe this is an exception. In my blog post yesterday, I surmised that the sudden advent in flight of the male from Petty Bearskin meant that he and his mate had failed in their 2d nesting attempt. This seemed a safe presumption; I knew from many years of experience that males practise non often leave females alone with small chicks. Yet I was mistaken. A lake resident (thanks, Nancy!) corrected me by pointing out that at least one chick had hatched on Little Bearskin this twelvemonth, and Martha found two chicks on the lake during her early on-morning visit today.

As we take explained in an earlier publication, at that place are 3 reasons why males tend not to leave their breeding lakes when their chicks are in their first ii weeks of life. First, females cannot yodel, and therefore they are unable to discourage intruders from landing in the lake and budgeted chicks past ways of this aggressive vocal signal. Second, by virtue of their greater size, males are better equipped to intimidate and bulldoze away intruders that do arroyo chicks. Third, having two parents guarding chicks when they are minor permits breeding pairs to cover two bases — they can send i parent out to engage intruders and leave the other to protect the chicks, in case an intruder should come close.

In fact, years ago on Langley Lake we witnessed the danger that parents face if i of them ventures off territory when their chicks are minor. In this instance, two intruders landed when the male was off the lake, forcing the female to choose between: ane) staying beside its calendar week-erstwhile chick, and 2) leaving its chick to interact with the intruders. She chose the latter course, but that strategy backfired when the intruders pigeon and separate up. At this most inopportune moment, the chick happened to requite an alert call that 1 of the intruders heard. The intruder quickly institute the calling chick and, with no parent nearby to intervene, killed the chick in a matter of seconds.

With that horrid incident seared into my brain (and a good bargain of quantitative information on chick omnipresence to back information technology up), I was adequately confident that the appearance of a breeding male person on a lake not his own meant that he had failed in his convenance attempt at home. In fact, I am yet scratching my head over the Little Bearskin male person's determination to exit his mate, his ii helpless chicks, and his home lake with its abundant nutrient supply, in social club to visit a neighboring lake that held zero but failed and displaced conspecifics. I approximate I will have to continue my research for a few more than years to make sense of that odd bit of behavior.

My new team and I are racing effectually the written report expanse, still catching up to our banded convenance population. At each lake, we record the bands of the female and male, await quickly for any agile or failed nests — but in obvious places — and race to the adjacent lake to repeat the process: ("Ok…the female has a yellow band on correct and is carmine over green on left? Good plenty….permit'due south go!".) The work is frantic and exhausting, and nosotros are only halfway through. We are all so busy roofing lakes that there is little time to reflect on what we have seen. I have trouble remembering what lakes we have even visited at the end of each day, so anxious am I to eat a meal and hitting the hay for the next 5am wakeup.

Nevertheless some patterns take emerged from our lake visits that remain lodged in my encephalon. It has been a dreadful first circular of nests for most breeding pairs. Typical pairs in the report area abased their first nesting attempt three to four weeks ago because of the clouds of flies that descended upon them and have only just begun to renest or think about doing and then. Based on what we have seen, it appears that 70 to 80% of all pairs could non stand to incubate the commencement clutch of eggs they laid in early on to mid-May, making 2020 even slightly more than devastating a black wing year than 2014, the previous worst year on tape. Our study population has seen a steady slide in chick production over the by quarter century; 2020 volition just strengthen that demoralizing pattern.

So yous tin can imagine how it warmed my heart to hear about Linda'due south loon pair ("Clune" and "Beloved"), who managed to buck the tendency and stick it out through all four weeks of incubation. At a time when the population as a whole is reeling, the assiduous parenting on brandish in Linda's video below took my mind off of the population'southward struggles for a moment and reminded me that good things tin notwithstanding happen.

Many of you accept eastward-mailed me to ask, "What became of the duckling reared by loons?" Information technology is a reasonable question. Each passing day during the summer revealed startling new behavioral quirks in the peculiar, touching relationship between these inseparable misfits. Having witnessed well over a thousand loon families — and by this I mean those consisting entirely of loons — I found each of my visits to the Long Lake pair a revelation. Each time I watched male and female loons feed their precious adoptee a fish or warn information technology virtually a passing eagle, I involuntarily shook my head. How could 2 species separated by 70 millions of years of evolution come together into such a tight and successful makeshift family? Every day the family remained together seemed to defy logic.

Nonetheless their familial bond persisted. Following my most recent mail on the loon-duckling family, the duckling grew and grew some more. By the end of July (as Linda Grenzer's photo shows), the duckling was shut to adult size, and the simply uncertainty was whether or not it would sink its parents by continuing to ride virtually on their backs. By mid-August, the pair and duckling were spending more than time apart. On multiple occasions, we saw the duckling have off and fly around the lake a few times before landing almost its broken-hearted guardians. By now fully capable of feeding itself and weeks across the normal fledging date for mallards reared by their own species, the duckling seemed to cling to its parents more for their sake than for its own.

By September quaternary, the duckling and its loon parents were gone from the lake. Nosotros volition not ever know where the duckling went or how it lived after leaving Long Lake. Although we could have attempted to mark information technology in July, as we do loon chicks, I could non bring myself to do and then. Even as a scientist fascinated past the behavioral outcome, I was too transfixed by the beauty of the family to capture them and risk disrupting it.

Juvenile loons are in a race against time. While their parents seem to relax following the breeding season — wandering from lake to lake as if on a goodwill tour — juveniles, like the iii-calendar month-quondam in Linda Grenzer'due south photo, confront a ticking clock. After hatching in June or July, juvies must reach near-adult size by ten weeks of age, practice takeoffs and landings, and become potent plenty to make flights of hundreds of miles on their southward migration in early Nov.

They are racing the ice. Temperatures cool in September, become unpleasantly dank in October, and truly plummet in Nov — and lake temperatures follow suit. Ice-up tin can occur someday between mid-November and mid-December in northern Wisconsin, and water ice-up is the end of the line for juveniles. Opportunistic bald eagles await juveniles that are not prepared to migrate and go trapped in the ice. Obviously sensing the desperate task that will confront their offspring in the autumn, parents stuff them with fish for eight long weeks in July and August. Chicks grow explosively during mid-summer. But they face their most challenging chore in autumn, when parental support wanes and they must learn to feed themselves, amend their torso condition, and prepare for their southward journey.

In general, scientists take paid little attention to the juvenile menstruum in birds. Our neglect is natural plenty. The convenance season is chock full of interesting behavioral and ecological events: pairing of mates, defense of breeding territories, choice of nest sites, and relentless territorial intrusions by nonbreeding adults seeking to settle. Perhaps ecologists can be forgiven for focusing their attention on breeding behavior and trusting that juveniles will take care of themselves.

But we wondered. If young adults settle on convenance lakes that closely resemble their natal lakes, might juveniles — which must fight for their lives just to become adults — also showroom clear preferences for sure kinds of lakes over others? Constrained by flightlessness to forage only within the lake where they hatched, nosotros might expect juveniles to go highly specialized to hunt and consume the species of prey establish on the natal lake. And so once they become capable of flying, we might expect them to visit and forage on other lakes very similar to their natal i. That is, juveniles reared on a nutrition of bluegill sunfish and used to hunting that species should spend most of the pre-migratory menstruation visiting lakes full of bluegill that they can grab and eat efficiently. And juveniles accustomed to eating snails and leeches should find lakes total of those invertebrates on which they can feast.

Our involvement in lake visitation patterns of juveniles during fall inspired us to plot the local movements of youngsters between lakes in the fall of 2012, 2013, and 2014. Kristin, Gabby, and Nathan used their band-spotting skills to locate juvies in September and October of these years. They plant close to 200 cases where a juvenile we had marked had flown to forage on a lake other than its own. Using these information, Brian, who joined us this summer, asked, "Do juveniles forage on lakes at random, or practise they prefer to fodder on lakes similar the one that hatched them?". As the effigy below shows, the mean difference in pH betwixt a juvenile'southward natal lake and the lake where we spotted information technology foraging (ruby-red vertical line) was far less than the distribution of differences we would have expected, if juvies had foraged randomly (grey bell-shaped curve).

Z_pH_Randomization

Although Brian has a few statistical checks to consummate, the pattern seems clear. Juveniles showroom strong preference for lakes that resemble their natal one in two respects: 1) pH and 2) water clarity (information not shown). Brian'due south analysis is ongoing, and he is trying to learn how closely these chemical and concrete attributes predict the nutrient available to loons in a lake. Just nosotros are betting that the stark preference of three-calendar month-old juveniles for lakes that remind them of home occurs for a simple reason. Juvies try to spend their time hunting prey in familiar weather condition to build themselves upwardly for their most unsafe first due south journeying.

I will admit it: I am flabbergasted. When the Bass Lake pair hatched iii chicks in the showtime week of July, I never gave them a hazard. I suppose my pessimism was, in role, an endeavor to protect myself from further disappointment. This twelvemonth, as I have mentioned, has been a forgettable year in our study expanse. The dust has not yet settled completely, but 2019 volition certainly go down as the worst year for chick productivity since I began the study in 1993. And we take had some dreadful convenance years!

The Bass Lake Phenomenon — hatching and rearing of three vigorous chicks on a tiny lake — is so far a welcome exception to the dreary pattern. As I noted in my previous mail, however, the Bass Lake pair are fighting more than the negative tide of 2019. Lakes that you lot could throw a baseball across — well, lakes that Trevor Bauer could throw a baseball beyond — more often than not do non incorporate enough food to allow two chicks to achieve fledging size, let lonely iii. Fawn Lake is a case in point. Slightly larger than Bass, Fawn hatched two chicks, which weighed two.1 and 1.ii kilograms at capture x days ago. So the smaller chick is just over one-half the weight of its sibling, and its survival prospects appear grim. Moreover, Evelyn reported that the beta chick was begging fruitlessly for feedings from the male today, while its fat and sassy sibling rested nearby. Such is the normal state of diplomacy for families that effort to raise more than ane chick on pocket-size lakes.

But don't tell all of this to the over-sized Bass Lake family unit. Every bit Linda'southward recent photograph shows, the trio of chicks there are beating the odds then far. During my visit to the lake today, the 3-calendar week-old chicks swam along in a tight group, tracking their foraging parents and getting fed constantly. The food items brought upwards by the parents were non tiny minnows and leeches, such as ane oftentimes sees on smaller, food-stressed lakes, but crappies and yellow perch big enough that the chicks had to work a flake to consume them. There was no desperate begging, no pecking of the modest chick by its larger siblings. Most of import, the size disparity among the chicks, quite evident a week ago, is less so now, which suggests that all chicks are receiving ample feedings.

I retain some healthy pessimism about the loon family on Bass. I have seen too many starved chicks on pocket-sized lakes to feel otherwise. But if a pair of loons tin can adopt a mallard duckling, raise the duckling on fish they grab and feed to it, and teach information technology to dive every bit they do, I suppose anything is possible.

We are feeling snakebit this yr on the Loon Project. Late July in almost years is a time of celebration — a time when nosotros winnow the list of covered lakes to those with one or 2 chicks and stop visiting those that accept failed to produce young. In well-nigh years, this narrowing process gives the entire squad an emotional boost. Instead of surveying pairs that have lost 2 nesting attempts, accept had a pair member evicted, or — worst of all — are sitting for the seventh calendar week on a clutch of eggs that we know to exist infertile, nosotros focus on the positive.

Dropping failed pairs from our circuits gives us a pleasantly warped view of loon breeding success.  We smile while watching chicks ride on parents' backs. We chuckle at the adamant efforts of youngsters to dive like their parents, and at parents' concerned peering underwater as they monitor those efforts. And we marvel at the rapid and well-choreographed diving responses of entire families to flying intruders, which no doubt succeed at hiding chicks from intruders and thus protect the territorial buying of both pair members.

This year has been different. Owing to a belatedly ice-out, a lengthy period of black fly abundance — and perhaps other factors we take not yet detected — 2019 has been a dismal twelvemonth for loon breeding in northern Wisconsin. When I asked Elaina a few days ago to assist assign each field observer to a circuit of lakes, this fact became undeniable. She scoffed. "We have only been to these lakes!", she replied. She was correct. Whereas an observer would usually visit each lake with chicks every 3 to iv days, nosotros are now visiting chick lakes about every other day. The reason is simple; only about a quarter of our lakes have produced young in 2019; last year, information technology was over one-half. I have begun to view the few pairs with chicks as the chosen ones.

The loon team is searching for a silver lining, but information technology is difficult. The list of failed lakes is a "Who's Who" of traditional chick-producers. Blue Lake yielded only one chick in 2019 despite the efforts of ii highly successful pairs. Eastward and West Horsehead both failed to raise young. Neither pair on Two Sisters Lake reared a chick; one has to go back to 2010 to run across the last time that happened. And on and on.

Elaina, back for her 2nd year on the study, feels the blow harder than most. Last night, every bit nosotros drove betwixt our outset and 2nd capture lakes of the twelvemonth, she and Tarryn grasped at a silverish lining. "At least we will not have to conduct the motorboat in at Buck and Greenbass", they agreed. (The carry-in for canoes at both lakes is lengthy; to carry in a motorboat for capture, as nosotros practice most years, looks like masochism.)

IMG_0033

It is non all gallows humour and rueful comments this year. Linda Grenzer'south two striking photos show 1 of the few bright spots. In an credible endeavor to recoup for the poor productivity of other lakes, the Bass Lake pair hatched not 2, but iii chicks! 2 chicks is already a crowd for loon parents; Gabby Jukkala's newspaper showed that male loons yodel three times as oftentimes while defending two-chick broods than with singleton chicks. Imagine the stress faced by the Bass Lake parents! Only since Tarryn texted me excitedly almost two weeks ago to denote the spectacle, the parents have tended their over-sized family assiduously. Despite obvious size disparities between blastoff, beta, and gamma chicks, all three are staying together and receiving regular feedings. Linda's hilarious "loon pyramid" photo suggests that there are even brief moments of reluctant alloparenting.

I will be honest; I am on pins and needles. Bass Lake is a 40-acre lake. Only once in 18 years of hatches — way back in 1995 — has the Bass Lake pair even fledged two chicks. Never has any pair in our study area raised iii chicks to fledging historic period. (Washburn Lake did hatch three in 1997; they fledged simply one.) So my scientist'due south sense tells me that the gamma chick is doomed, and the beta chick's survival is highly uncertain. Only I am trying to stay upbeat about the family of v on Bass. I need something to cling to this year.