It is July and time to hide the chicks! That’s right; while human parents show off their progeny — perhaps partly to solicit help in caring for them — loons do the opposite. You see, intruders looking to evict territorial residents scour lakes for chicks, because the presence of chicks indicates that the lake contains good nesting habitat and abundant food. So by producing young, a breeding pair has put a giant target on their backs, providing an incentive for any intruder that discovers the chicks (like one of the six intruders shown in Linda’s photo) to return the following year and make an eviction attempt. We should expect, therefore, that parents would hide their chicks from intruders whenever possible.

Of course, breeding pairs are fighting a losing battle. On the one hand, they must feed and protect their chicks, which includes vocalizing often to warn their mate and chicks of passing eagles and other dangers. On the other hand, when intruders fly over or land, parents need to ignore the chicks altogether. Toggling between these two behavioral modes is no small task. Furthermore, while it is desirable to protect your long-term ownership of the territory by hiding your chicks from intruders, you do not want to lose them in the process!

Although chick-hiding is a tricky business, loon families do have a strategy for coping with the sudden appearance of intruders overhead, which fly over at a speed of about 70 miles per hour. We call it “dive and scatter”. At the appearance of a flying intruder in the distance, a loon pair and their chicks quickly slip under water. The chicks swim toward shore and, once there, are hidden by their brown plumage, which makes them resemble rocks or logs. Meanwhile parents swim under water to the middle of the lake, which draws the intruders to them and not the chicks. The aim of this coordinated behavior pattern by chicks and their parents seems clear: keep intruders from seeing the chicks. On its face, dive and scatter behavior clearly seems a means of helping parents’ maintain possession of their territory.

I need to pause here for a second to consider an alternative explanation for dive and scatter. In fact, the most obvious reason why a pair and chicks would dive and scatter is to protect the chicks themselves. Intruders do kill chicks commonly, so this is a viable hypothesis at first blush. But chicks are most vulnerable to being killed by intruders in their first two weeks, so dive and scatter as chick defense — if it is a viable explanation — should occur mainly among small chicks. Yet dive and scatter occurs rarely in small chicks and very commonly in those four weeks and older. So the hypothesis that dive and scatter is a behavior to protect small chicks from intruder attacks can be easily rejected by its timing.

We have known about dive and scatter behavior for some years, but yesterday on Woodcock Lake I learned that loon parents know when to call off the ruse. While feeding their single chick along the lake shore, the Woodcock pair spotted two intruders in flight. The family dove and scattered, the chick hiding near shore and parents making for the lake’s center, in stereotyped fashion. Following the script, the two intruders landed by the parents (and far from the chick), the four adults circling and diving together for several minutes. The charade abruptly fell apart when an eagle flew over the part of the lake where the chick was hiding. Both parents immediately ceased interacting with the intruders, wheeled towards the eagle, and wailed desperately for several minutes, while swimming in that direction. In a half-second, the breeding pair had morphed from cool, detached individuals with nothing to hide into into frantic worry-warts!

Some might view such a loss of composure by a breeding pair to be quite costly. If intruders are able to learn about the presence of chicks by detecting chick defense behavior such as that shown by the Woodcock pair, then the pair exposed themselves to the threat of future eviction by wailing to defend their chick in the presence of two intruders. A clear blunder….until you consider that the alternative was to lose the priceless product of their summer’s breeding efforts.