Though it sounds odd to say, people put loons on a pedestal. Their love for loons causes many people to want them to be a bit better than us. Of course, this is the origin of the popular myth that loons mate for life. Such a handsome animal, it seems, should have behavior to match. Besides, loons certainly appear to work so well together in foraging, defending their territory, and rearing young that one can easily imagine that male and female are committed to each other deeply.

Having studied several other species of animals before turning to loons, I did not share the expectation that loons would be good role models for humans. I had seen too many cases of nature red in tooth and claw. In fact, I suppose I expected to learn ways in which loons might not fit the mold of traditional monogamy. What has surprised me the most of all my findings is the degree to which loons have broken that mold. Rather than aiming to remain paired with a single mate throughout their lives, loons seem pursue a far different but straightforward goal. They seek to produce as many chicks as possible by remaining on a breeding territory whenever possible. This strategy requires them to turn a blind eye when their mate is evicted by another loon. Their allegiance is to the breeding territory, not the mate.

No territory illustrates the cold pragmatism of loons better than Blue Lake-Southeast. Recent years have been turbulent on Blue-Southeast. In 2015, the male was evicted by an unmarked male after producing two chicks with his mate. The displaced male hung around on the lake and later regained his position, but last year was a repeat performance; this time a four-year-old male from Bolger Lake evicted the long-term male after hatching and killed the single chick. In a scene worthy of Greek mythology, the Bolger bird actually picked up the lifeless two-week-old chick while chasing its mother across the water’s surface.

Now, if a human mother had witnessed such a grisly spectacle, I doubt if she would have been able to forgive and forget. But loons are not humans; the female whose chick had been killed by the usurper quickly paired with him and remained so this spring. The unlikely pair weathered the black fly emergence in May, hatched a chick in early June, and are now raising that chick on the east lobe of Blue Lake. As the triptych of photos above shows, I caught up with this very tame family yesterday afternoon. At the time, “Chick-Killer” (as my field team affectionately calls the male) was enthusiastically diving for food for the thriving chick, while the female looked on. The dutiful, coordinated parenting of the two adults suggested that they constitute an indivisible unit — that their pair bond would withstand the test of time. But looks are deceiving.