Two days ago, Mark Naniot of Wild Instincts got a report that a loon on Two Sisters Lake had been hooked by a fisherman in the leg and was trailing 50 feet of monofilament line and a bobber. Mark learned also that a well-intentioned kayaker had approached the loon and cut much of the line, including the bobber, but leaving the hook and several yards of fishing line trailing. Having captured and unhooked a loon several weeks before on the same lake, we were disappointed to hear of another angling incident. Could the same bird have become entangled again?
Seth happened to be collecting data on Two Sisters Lake yesterday. He found the impacted loon, which was not the Two Sisters-West male that we had rescued in June but the female from Two Sisters-East. (The lake has east and west halves, each with a successful loon pair.) Seth reported that the female was using her right leg sparingly, trailing fishing line, and had tried but failed to take off and fly on several occasions. She was not with her mate and two young chicks. Clearly the bird was in trouble.
After digesting Mark and Seth’s reports, I turned my attention to the prospect of catching the impacted loon. I viewed the challenge with mixed feelings. On the one hand, this female, hatched on Crab Lake in Vilas County in 2004, was well-known to us as a rather tame individual, making capture more feasible. On the other hand, we had captured her four nights earlier, which raised the possibility that she would recall that event and be more difficult to approach a second time. The most crucial card we held was that the female had chicks to protect.
Several major research programs that focus on common loons in the northern U.S. and Canada rely, more than any other factor, on the ability to approach adult loons closely at night and net them when they have chicks. If researchers could not approach adults closely during this reproductive window, we would not be able to mark them and study their behavior, health or survival. We would therefore be unable to generate models to determine whether loon populations are increasing or decreasing. In short, loon research would grind to a halt without the presence of chicks to freeze adults on the surface and permit us to catch and mark them.
Last night’s adventure served as a vivid reminder of the value of chicks to adult capture. We began searching for the hooked female shortly after nine p.m. and located her quickly along the southwest corner of the lake’s eastern half. Her behavior was odd; she seemed to restrict her movements to one small portion of the lake and was not anywhere near her mate or two large chicks. She held her hooked leg out of the water when resting on the surface. Before full darkness, we spotlighted and approached her to attempt capture, but she repeatedly dove before we could get within a net’s reach. Although frustrating, this cheered us a bit, because it showed that she was still relatively healthy despite the hook. At the same time, we were vexed to see that a loon that was in dire need of human assistance and which we had scooped out of the water with ease four nights before was resisting capture. We made several more passes by the female, until it became clear that the distance at which she dove was increasing rather than decreasing. We had a loon in need of help, a huge staff from Wild Instincts on shore waiting to assist it, and no obvious means of catching the bird. The critical ingredient missing was her chicks, which were nowhere nearby and which, we felt, might have held her on the surface and permitted us to net her.
We shut down the motor and listened. As luck would have it, an adult loon tremoloed far to the northwest, near the small bay where the Two Sisters-East pair had nested. Eric drove us up to the northwest corner, where, after 20 minutes of searching, we located the male and two chicks. Freshly banded from four nights before, the male and two strapping youngsters were nonetheless easy to net and pull into the boat. We set out southwards, where we had left the recalcitrant female, and released all three birds there. After several minutes of silence, the just-released male finally wailed and an answering tremolo came from 400 yards southeast. Again, we were in a bind, because the female had clearly swum a good distance away, where she would not soon encounter the chicks that we had released in hopes of capturing her. So again we netted a chick — leaving one near the male — and motored southeast to where we had heard the female. Having glimpsed the female for an instant before she dove, we gently held the chick in the boat until it vocalized. The injured female was transformed: she immediately sat up in the water, alert, and wailed to call her chick to her. We released the chick, the two reunited, and the female remained alert and protective next to her chick as we slowly approached and netted her.
After all of our efforts, it was rewarding to learn that, while the hook had punched cleanly through the female’s leg a few centimeters above her colored leg bands (see photo, courtesy of Wild Instincts), the prognosis (according to Mark) was excellent for recovery.
Looking back, we spent three hours capturing a family of loons that we had just caught and banded four days earlier. The rescue was a major production, requiring us not merely to locate and capture her but to find and capture her family in a remote location on the lake and transport them to her vicinity in order to restore her parental instincts and permit us to approach and net the impacted loon. This effort threw a wrench in our capture schedule, necessitating that we rush to three more lakes to capture loons there and cancel plans to attempt capture at two more lakes. Still, our team effort with Wild Instincts left us glowing; we had rescued a loon in peril and given her a chance to return to her life as a plucky protector of two young offspring.