To those of us accustomed to looking at loons during the summer, the sight of an adult caring for three chicks — as in Laura Unfried’s photos from two days ago — is peculiar. Loons, of course, almost always lay only two eggs. If they are lucky, two chicks hatch. It is by no means certain that those two chicks will survive to fledging age. In fact, 47 of 61 breeding pairs we study have one chick, not two. So the spectacle of two adults caring assiduously for three young was startling.

Close inspection of Laura’s photo from Hasbrook Lake reveals another peculiarity: the central chick is much larger — perhaps 10 days older — than the other two chicks. (Note that the left-hand chick is entirely downy with a small bill, whereas the center one has the anterior part of its head coming into adult feather and has a bill nearly as thick as the parent’s.) The obvious size disparity told Eileen Lonsdorf, who reported the third chick three days ago, that her nicely balanced family of two parents and two chicks had been joined by an interloper.

How could a huge, healthy chick somehow get separated from its biological parents and join another family? Territorial behavior among loons guarantees that each breeding pair will nest and rear its young far from other pairs. The likelihood of a chick straying from its own family to join another — fortuitously or by design —

seems remote.

One lesson that you learn if you do something for a long time is that rare events do occur. Chicks do very occasionally leave their parents and territory to join other families. We have noted two causes for such chick dispersal. First, starving chicks, especially beta chicks on small food-limited lakes that are being physically beaten by their alpha siblings, sometimes attempt to escape the abuse and find an alternate loon family nearby that will feed and protect them. Second, chicks that lose one or both parents to territorial eviction are forced to flee their natal territory and seek parental care elsewhere, if the adult that evicted a parent physically attacks them.

Solitary journeys by displaced chicks seeking new homes are desperate enterprises. One reason for this is that many lakes with loon chicks simply have no neighboring pairs with their own chicks that might be joined. Even if a displaced chick is fortunate enough to find a nearby pair with chicks, they are likely to be much older or younger than itself. If so, it is unlikely to be accepted by the new family. I vividly recall a case in 1999, when an abused beta chick undertook an astounding 1/2-mile trip across woods and roads from Benedict to Bug Lake in Vilas County, only to land with a foster sibling three times its size that beat it mercilessly until it perished.

Since the monster chick that joined the Hasbrook pair is a robust, well-fed individual, we could rule out that it fled to Hasbrook because of sibling abuse or lack of food. So we were left to conclude tentatively that a nearby territorial eviction forced this young loon to relocate. We pulled out a map to assess the possibilities.

Immediately, we pinpointed Cunard Lake, which is separated from Hasbrook by a quarter mile of woods and bog, as the likely source of the wandering chick. Cunard, a regular study lake of ours, had two large, healthy, 5-week-old chicks at our last visit on July 25th. Yesterday, however, I found the lake empty of loons, except a single floater adult. The steward of the campground reported that loons had been chasing each other repeatedly across the water on July 30th and 31st, which indicated a protracted territorial battle. The absence of the territorial pair suggested strongly that the breeding male had lost the battle to a usurper and either died or been forced to abandon his territory and chicks. This tragic event, in turn, would have scattered the rest of the family and subjected the chicks to attacks by the new male owner.

Last night we captured the peculiar but close-knit family of two adults and three chicks on Hasbrook. It will require genetic analysis to be certain that the huge new chick on Hasbrook is a refugee from Cunard and the offspring of the displaced Cunard pair, as we surmise. But we have strong reason to believe that he is a most fortunate survivor of a desperate overland journey.