No Lights

Loon
THE BIRD THAT DEFINES WILDERNESS HAS BEEN
REVILED AND REVERED, THREATENED AND RESTORED.
DAVID SOMMERSTEIN JOINS A FIRST LAKE RESEARCH SAFARI AND REPORTS
ON THE PRESENT CHALLENGES AND UNCERTAIN FUTURE OF ADIRONDACK LOONS
PHOTOGRAPHS
BY NANCIE BATTAGLIA
I held a loon chick hostage
in my lap for this story.
It was early September. You almost have to provoke an adult loon that
late in the summer if you want to catch it. At that moment in their
life cycles, loons are losing their territorial attack instinct. Soon they’ll
fly off to their winter fishing spots on the Atlantic coast, leaving their
loon “tweens” to fend for themselves and find their own way to
warmer climes.
Just six weeks earlier everything was different. Across the Adirondacks, we humans were enjoying one of the most endearing sights
nature has to offer: a proud loon gliding across the water’s surface
with a fluffy chick huddled on its back. In mid-July, an adult loon will
do almost anything to protect that chick. It’ll bullet straight at a boat
entering its territory, churning high on the water—“penguin-walking,”
as experts call it. And that makes them easy pickings for loon catchers. But not in September.
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ADIRONDACK LIFE
September/October 2013
September/October 2013 A D I R O N D A C K L I F E
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It’s nine o’clock at night, and darkness has fallen on First Lake, near the
village waterfront of Old Forge. I’m with
a crew that catches, bands and tracks
loons across the Adirondack Park. Over
more than a decade, they’ve learned
that Adirondack loon pairs return to the
same lake year after year, like snowbird
couples returning to their summer cabin. And they’ve watched loons survive
acid rain and other threats, and even
thrive today.
Nina Schoch has led the effort as the
coordinator of the Biodiversity Research
Institute’s Adirondack Center for Loon Conservation. Her team
has caught and banded more than 200 loons since 1998. When
she started, she didn’t know much about loons at all, “except
they were a cool-looking bird that made neat calls,” she confesses. A veterinarian and wildlife rehabilitator by training,
Schoch has had a front-row seat to the intimate lives of these
birds. She’s watched the same birds year after year, learned
their different personalities, and seen them raise their families. And doing what we’re about to do—capture a loon and
hold it in our hands—is nothing short of “magical,” she says.
Schoch spreads out a map on the hood of the Department
of Environmental Conservation (DEC) truck that brought us
here. Her partner, Gary Lee, the loon sentinel in this area, leans
in and shines his flashlight on two spots. “The one pair’s in this
bay,” he whispers, “and the other went around to that bay,
what they call Cohen’s Bay, because Cohen used to own the
point there.” He also points out the spot where he saw a loon
that appeared to have a broken leg—“Pretty sure he was hit
by a boat,” Lee says.
The trajectory of the common loon population should be
a tremendous wildlife recovery success story. Decades ago,
Adirondackers used to shoot loons for sport because the birds
ate the same fish they liked to catch. DDT poisoned all bird
populations in the 1940s and ’50s. “There were no nesting
pairs of loons on the Fulton Chain 20 years ago, not one,” Lee
affirms. Last summer, almost every numbered lake along the
chain was home to a loon couple, its nest and, on average, two
chicks per year. Across the Adirondacks the loon population
has more than doubled since the 1980s, to about 2,000 today.
But there’s a new threat that tempers the good news. Mercury, the
Clockwise from top left:
highly toxic metal, is floating great
Nina Schoch cradles a
loon chick she’ll use to
distances on air currents and falling
lure an adult loon toward
into the aquatic systems here. It
the boat. Blood samples
builds up in the food chain, up to
will be tested for mercury levels. Loon pairs
the top predators in the system—
return to First Lake
including the common loon. Reevery summer. Schoch
searchers say that makes the loon a
and naturalist Gary Lee
take measurements beperfect indicator species of how
fore tagging and releasmercury affects all organisms in the
ing loons. Pages 40–41:
ecosystem, including humans. And
Schoch on Clear Pond,
near Meacham Lake.
the findings so far are not good.
ONCE HUNTED FOR SPORT, LATER POISONED
BY DDT AND ACID RAIN, TODAY THE ADIRONDACK LOON
POPULATION HAS MORE THAN DOUBLED SINCE THE 1980s. BUT
A NEW THREAT TEMPERS THE GOOD NEWS.
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ADIRONDACK LIFE
September/October 2013
A report released last summer by the Biodiversity Research
Institute (BRI), based in Gorham, Maine, the Wildlife Conservation Society and the New York State Energy and Research
Development Authority found more than half of male loons
in the Adirondack Park have a moderate to high risk of mercury poisoning. Some birds tested have double the safe
amount of mercury in their blood.
What happens is that mercury turns loons into bad parents. They produce fewer eggs. They spend less time on their
nests keeping those eggs warm. They don’t take care of the
chicks as much when they’re hatched. Sometimes they abandon those fluffy critters altogether.
Tonight, our goal is to catch more adult loons, test their
blood for mercury and band them with high-tech geolocators
so they can be tracked year-round.
Author William H. H. Murray wrote in 1869 that loons “are
the shyest and most expert swimmers of all waterfowl.” He
was a sportsman, not a scientist, but his observation is spoton. It took groundbreaking loon researchers like Judy McIntyre years to develop a stealth operation that could literally
net birds for study.
It takes three people—a boat driver, a spotter with a flashlight and a netter. Loons have excellent eyesight, so a moonless or cloud-covered night, like this one, is indispensable. The
spotter shines the light directly in a loon’s eyes, blinding it, so
the boat can get close enough for the netter to swoop in.
It was 75 degrees and sunny earlier, but now we’re all bundled in fleece and raincoats as the DEC motorboat rumbles
southeast through the dark toward Dog Island. Our captain,
DEC Region 5 wildlife manager Lance Durfey, switches to an
electric motor. Schoch, her shoulder-length wavy hair stuffed
under a winter hat, furrows her brow in concentration. She
sweeps a floodlight back and forth, the beam combing the
water’s dark surface. The warm glow of lakeshore living rooms
reminds us we’re close to civilization. Still, we hear that iconic sound of the wild echo occasionally across the lake.
Schoch turns on an electronic loon call with four different
sounds: the wail (the long haunting coooo-oooo loons use to
locate one another), the tremolo (distress), the yodel (the
males’ territorial screech) and the hoot (the loon version of
“Hey, what’s up?”). The fake calls are answered by real loons
September/October 2013 A D I R O N D A C K L I F E
43
YOU NEED MUSCLE TO IMMOBILIZE AN ADULT LOON
TO MEASURE IT AND TAKE ITS BLOOD. THE BIRDS CAN WEIGH UP
TO 14 POUNDS, HAVE A SERRATED BILL THAT CAN TEAR ANYTHING
IT CLAMPS DOWN ON—AND THEY PUT UP A FIGHT.
getting closer, and they’re repeated by their brethren across
the ridge on Little Moose Lake. We’re silent, expectant and a
little anxious.
Gary Lee stands silhouetted against the lights, holding the
long pole of the net like a staff, sort of a Moses of the loons.
“There’s the chick!” whispers Schoch urgently as she freezes
it in the floodlight. The electric motor of the boat sighs as we
float closer. Lee holds the net just above the surface and waits.
And waits. Then—splash!—the boat teeters, the loon squawks
and a chorus of other loons yodel warnings in the darkness.
Schoch says to me, “David, do you want a chick on your lap?”
But it isn’t really a question and, before I know it, she plops the
chick on my rain pants. “Oh my gosh, such a little thing,” I
gasp to no one in particular.
The chick’s about the size of a house cat, and it feels about
the same. Its gray down is as soft as the finest fur. Schoch
holds its head so it won’t turn around and bite me, then she
starts petting its neck, from where it meets its body to the top
of its head. “Chicks are kind of like owls,” Schoch says. (Right,
we all know how to pet an owl.) “They like to have their heads
rubbed. It will put them to sleep and keep them calm.” I caress
the soft down and, sure enough, the muscles in the chick’s
neck relax and its head droops down. I feel its breathing
become easy and rhythmic.
More loons scream anxiously a few hundred feet away. “You
hear those birds tremolo-ing over there? They’re upset, obviously,” says Schoch, as she grabs the floodlight. “I’m going to
go start lighting again.”
We have our hostage.
If Nina Schoch is the scientist behind the Adirondack loon
monitoring operation, Gary Lee is the muscle. And you need
muscle to immobilize an adult loon to measure it and take
its blood. They can weigh 10 to 14 pounds. They have a serrated bill that can tear anything it clamps down on, and they
put up a fight. “Anything they can get a hold of,” says Lee,
“they’ll bite it.”
Loons have bitten Lee on the forearm and the thigh. They’ve
gnawed on his back pocket and hem of his jacket. A male gave
him “a pretty good gash” one night on Henderson Lake near
Tahawus. It was a bird they had tried to catch the previous
year. “He kind of knew us,” Lee remembers. “He penguinwalked right up to the boat and threw a ball of water in my
face. We got him in the boat around three o’clock in the morn44
ADIRONDACK LIFE
September/October 2013
Study coauthor and BRI director David Evers says mercury is dampening the overall good news of the loon’s
rebound over the last three decades. “There’s a recovery
going on now across the region,” says Evers, “but it would
have been stronger recovery, and I still wonder, will that
recovery continue if mercury is a stressor? What happens when other stressors
come into play?”
Those additional stressors could be anything from lead sinkers to human
encroachments to climate change. In fact, BRI is investigating what Evers calls “a
perplexing” decline in the adult loon population on the Rangeley Lakes in northern Maine. Evers hypothesizes it could somehow be related to red tides in the
Atlantic Ocean. BRI is seeking funding for further study.
Evers says the implications of mercury pollution go far beyond loons. Loons are
a good indicator species because they eat at the top of the food chain and live up
to 30 years. “If it’s affecting loons, it’s affecting other birds that are eating fish regularly from those same lakes,” he says. “And I think you can easily make that next
step that that can impact our own health, especially if we’re regularly catching and
(Continued on page 59)
eating fish from those same lakes.”
Researchers have developed elaborate techniques to catch loons
safely and with as little
disruption as possible.
IIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIII IIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIII IIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIII
ing and while I was holding him, he
nailed me pretty good.”
Gary Lee is 69. He has soft blue eyes, a
gray beard and a sturdy build, the product of more than 30 years patrolling the
Moose River Recreation Area as a New
York State forest ranger. Awards, trophies
and a plaque recognizing his induction
into the New York State Outdoorsmen
Hall of Fame adorn his home office in
Inlet. Lee hunts, fishes and traps—he
caught 69 beaver and 19 otter last year—
and he spends much of his winters in retirement snapping
photos of eagles and other birds of prey from a blind he set up
by a pond on his woodsy property. He bands hundreds of birds
that feast at feeders scattered around his yard and records
the data meticulously in journals on his desk. He loves birds.
Lee dedicates his summers to loons. He’s caught more than
70 of them, five in one night once. He monitors 22 breeding
pairs of loons on 15 lakes. Call him the loon whisperer. “I talk
to all my birds,” he says. “I go in the same canoe every time,
same clothes. They know me. They talk to me when I go out
there.” He also sets out a dozen platforms every year to induce
new loon pairs to establish nests on lakes that haven’t had
loons in decades. (Schoch disagrees with this technique. She
believes it encourages people to meddle too much in loon
behavior. A 2007 study found platforms can cause increased
stress and aggressive behavior among male loons.)
To hear Lee talk about “his” loons is to hear a man who has
a deep, personal relationship with the natural world, who sees
loon behavior as ongoing, often anthropomorphized, stories.
He knows the female on Mitchell Pond sticks her banded foot
in the air when he paddles near, “as if to say, ‘OK, you got me.
Now leave me the hell alone.’” He knows the female on Darts
Lake was spotted wintering in Tampa Bay. And he knows the
male on Twitchell Lake was X-rayed with a fish hook in its
belly. Lee calls him the “fish hook male.”
Several years ago Lee started noticing that some of his loon
pairs were guarding one egg instead of the usual two per summer. Researchers still haven’t figured out how to determine the
age of a loon, so he thought the loon parents might just be
getting older. But he also suspected that higher mercury levels in the lakes could have something to do with it.
The researchers from the Biodiversity Research Institute
were using hard data to document similar changes. In BRI’s
study released last summer, Adirondack Loons: Sentinels of Mercury Pollution in New York’s Aquatic Ecosystems, they found that
21 percent of the males and eight percent of the females have
mercury levels high enough to impact their reproductive success. The loons with the highest levels were in the southwestern corner of the park.
“Mercury is a neurotoxin,” says Schoch. “So it makes the
loons depressed and lethargic and they don’t have the energy to defend their territories well. They don’t get up on the
nests as much. They just don’t have the energy like they normally would to care for the nest and the chicks.”
WHAT YOU CAN DO
Leave loons and their nests
alone! Researchers have been
noticing an increasing number
of nest disturbances from
canoeists and kayakers trying
to paddle close to snap that perfect picture. Keep your distance—at least 100 feet—and
use a zoom lens instead.
Participate in the Adirondack
Loon Census the third Saturday
in July. Thanks to Adirondack
volunteers, the census has
documented a 40% increase of
monitored lakes with loons, from
127 lakes in 2001 to more than
200 last year.
Be a responsible angler. Recycle
your fishing line, so loons and
other birds don’t get caught up.
Thanks to a new program this
summer, you’ll find fishing
line recycling containers at boat
launches across the Adirondacks. Also, replace your lead
sinkers if you haven’t already. A
loon may die if it swallows a lead
sinker. A program from 20022004 helped anglers swap out
lead sinkers for non-lead ones at
area tackle shops.
If you’re boating, slow down
near loons and loon nests. A
boat’s wake can swamp loon
chicks and their nests, or separate them from their parents.
Keep shorelines natural so
loons and other wildlife can find
safe, healthy places to nest.
Related articles from our
archive:
“The Loon Lady” (June 1995)
www.adirondacklife.com/articles
/mcintyre
“New Loon” (December 2006)
www.adirondacklife.com/articles
/newloon
LOONSCAPE
Continued from page 45
The mercury comes predominantly
from coal-fired power plants in the Midwest. Clarkson University professor Tom
Holsen has been studying mercury in
the Adirondacks for more than a decade.
“Prevailing winds, as we all know who
live here, are from the southwest,” says
Holsen, “and that’s the exact direction
of the coal-fired power plants.”
In 2011 the Environmental Protection
Agency finalized new rules for mercury
emissions, and already dozens of coalfired units are being shut down because
they’re too costly to retrofit. Utilities say
that will mean higher electricity prices.
But Holsen says it should also lower
mercury levels in Adirondack lakes over
time. Now attention is turning to global
mercury levels as coal continues to power Asia’s economies. This fall, negotiators will work to finalize an agreement
by 140 countries to reduce mercury pollution worldwide. Called the Minamata
Convention, it’s named after a Japanese
town where people suffered terrible
mercury poisoning from an industrial
wastewater discharge in the 1950s.
Still, many fear the damage caused
by mercury in the Adirondacks will persist. Mitch Lee, supervisor of Parks and
Recreation for the town of Inlet, an Adirondack storyteller and Gary Lee’s son,
says even if there were zero tolerance
rules for mercury emissions starting
today, “you’d have to laugh to think mercury would be gone from these lakes in
two to three generations.”
Back on First Lake I’ve been petting the
loon chick on my lap for more than half
an hour. Its parents tremolo nearby, but
each time we try to get closer they dive
beneath the surface, sometimes right
under the boat, and we have to reverse
direction. Even with their chick in hand,
it’s clear who’s on home turf here.
Just before 11, Schoch blinds one of
the parents with her spotlight and it
freezes. Time almost stops as the boat
inches closer. Then Gary Lee plunges the
net into the water and scoops up the
bird. The night explodes with squawks
and clumsy thumps as Lee wrestles the
loon into his arms and tucks its bill
behind his back. The bird chews on his
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LOONSCAPE
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pocket and fights to get away. “She’s trying to swim on my lap,” Lee mutters. A
cold mist is just starting to fall.
The loon is a female they’ve never
caught before, a bonus for a long night
spent on the water. Schoch opens a toolbox containing pliers, metal bands and
notebooks. She takes all kinds of measurements and samples, then straps the
geolocator on one of the loon’s legs and
an ID band on the other. Finally, we let
the loon and its chick go. Schoch and Lee
drop into their seats and take a deep
breath. “I’m on a high,” Schoch sighs.
We never caught the male that night.
We gave up around one in the morning
as the mist turned to a chilly rain. But
there was plenty of good news. That
pair of loons has been breeding on First
Lake for seven or eight years. They’ve
chosen safe nesting spots and they’ve
managed to adapt to the motorboats
that whiz by. They’re almost certain to
return and raise more chicks. If Schoch
and Lee can catch the female again, the
researchers will learn from the geolocator exactly where her winter home is,
where the birds stop along their migration and more.
In fact, there’s plenty of good news in
this story, but it all comes with caveats.
Wildlife is cohabitating with humans’
increased recreational use of the park,
but disturbances like motorboats and
fishing line and lead sinkers remain
threats. Bald eagles are also enjoying a
comeback, but they eat loon eggs and
chicks. And stricter emissions rules appear likely to reduce mercury contamination, but the pollution may persist for
years to come.
Nina Schoch hopes the passion for
loons compels people to think more
broadly about the delicate web of life the
birds symbolize, and what they can do
to support conservation efforts to protect them. BRI’s David Evers says the institute will continue banding and monitoring loons and seeking funding for
more study. “We have reversed the tide
that has happened a century ago,” he
says. “That’s a great thing that we
should be happy about. I think we can
do more. And I think some things like
mercury get in the way.”
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