The season began inauspiciously at Crystal Lake in Lincoln County, which is along the southwestern fringe of our study area. Though it is a pleasant, rather clear lake, Crystal offers no nesting habitat for loons. Loons love most of all to place their nests on islands but also make use of boggy or marshy areas, which seem to provide safe havens from egg predators like raccoons and skunks. Crystal offers none of these options, as its shoreline comprises upland habitat and is thus easy for a hungry mammal to patrol. In fact, Crystal is such an inhospitable place for loons to breed that loon eggs vanish from its shoreline almost as soon as they are laid.
So I had mixed feelings to see a six year-old male hatched on nearby Muskellunge Lake settle to breed on Crystal in 2012. On the one hand, I was pleased that the young bird had found a territory after wandering around the local neighborhood of lakes for the three previous years. On the other hand, a settler on Crystal seemed doomed to reproductive failure. But the male and his parade of mates (three females in five years) persisted in their breeding efforts. As I reported earlier this summer, the male and his new mate in 2015 (she still licking her wounds from a recent eviction from neighboring Deer Lake) took a new approach to nesting in 2015 by choosing to place a nest on a swim raft off of a resident’s dock.
Once the egg had been protected from rolling off of the raft with a ring of rubber cut from an old tire and some natural nesting vegetation (thanks to quick thinking and skillful craftsmanship from Linda and Kevin Grenzer), things began looking up for the breeding pair. Although it was a bear for the male and female to clamber up onto the swim raft to incubate the egg, the setup seemed little different from the artificial nesting platforms that many lake residents place on the lake each year for their nesting pair to use. Given the virtually impregnable location, the probability of hatching a chick had gone from almost zero to near one.
As expected, the chick hatched successfully, and though it had trouble maneuvering around the rubber-reinforced nest (as Linda’s photo shows, above), it left the nest with its parents within a few days. Only when Linda reported that Crystal was experiencing a burst of territorial intruders — one of whom, by chance, was the mother of the Crystal male and hence the grandmother of the chick — did she and I become panicked. Intruders pose a grave hazard to small chicks. Would the pair that had so miraculously pulled off a hatch turn around and lose the chick to an infanticidal visitor? The threat was not trivial. As Linda’s remarkable and chilling photo shows, the Crystal parents broke a very basic rule of loon parenting: never permit intruders near your chick when it is less than 2 weeks old.
Yet the chick survived this brush with death. Nourished by a healthy supply of fish from the lake, the chick grew so rapidly that we were able to band it at three weeks of age, much younger than is usually possible for loon chicks. It has continued to flourish since capture. Now, at roughly 8 weeks of age, it looks like a 10-week-old, as the opening photo attests.
I have a tendency to dwell on disasters. Confronted with a large set of events — some positive, some negative — the latter seem to stick with me longer, leaving me with a sense that things are not going well at present and might not go well in the future. Yet at the end of a season when many breeding loons flirted with disaster — and one died — the story of the plucky Crystal chick stands as an odd and memorable exception.