Publishing papers in scientific journals is hard work. It requires patient and well-planned data collection, thoughtful statistical analysis, and painstaking writing and editing of a manuscript. And then the real work begins! Among the dozens of scientific journals that might publish the paper, one must select a journal that suits the topic of the paper, employs competent editors and reviewers, and makes its published papers available to a wide audience so that it will be read and cited by many colleagues in one’s field. Most crucial, one must convince the journal’s anonymous reviewers that the findings reported in the paper are robust and valuable. In short, publishing a paper is a journey.

Recently, we completed a successful journey, as our paper describing the process of territory settlement in young loons was accepted by Animal Behaviour. Although we would like to celebrate this event, we are more relieved than joyous; relieved because the paper represents a vast amount of field work, number-crunching and writing and became long and unwieldy enough that it earned harsh criticisms from some reviewers. So its publication became, as some journeys do, a story of survival in the face of adversity.

The paper will make available a trove of valuable findings. We report in the paper that young loons do not adhere to the most prominent model for territory settlement. This idea, termed the “foothold model”, maintains that young animals in search of breeding territories target a small set of established territories for intrusions, gradually gain confidence through increased familiarity with that limited set of territories, and then evict the owner of one of those territories (or outcompete another young loon for the vacancy, in the event of the owner’s death) in order to claim the territory as their own.  We show in our paper that, instead of using a foothold of this kind to gain a territory, young loons merely settle on a territory that is similar to their natal one. In some cases, they are able to occupy a vacant territory and breed there. In other cases, they wait to mature and improve in body condition and then evict an owner. But the repeated intrusions that young loons make to specific lakes are not attempts to build upon their familiarity with the lake and thereby increase their competitive ability there.  Rather, they are efforts to assess the fighting ability and perhaps the motivation of the current owner to defend its territory so that the young loon can judge when an attempted eviction is likely to be successful.  Reviewers described our findings as “provocative” within our field, and we hope they are right!

Thanks to all our supporters, especially landowners and friends, who allowed us to study their loons year after year. Publication of this meaty paper is evidence that our mutual investment in loon research is paying off.