As my family and friends will tell you, I am judgmental. When an event happens that could be attributed to mindless error, I am inclined to view it, instead, as deliberate selfishness or irresponsibility. I derive my hypercritical worldview in part from my profession. As a behavioral ecologist, I presume that much of the behavior we see in animals (including humans) has evolved in order to promote their evolutionary fitness. Put another way, I assume that a good deal of animal behavior is selfish — evolved because it allowed the ancestors of living individuals to survive better and leave more offspring than others of their species.

The presumption of selfishness is a helpful touchstone in my field. It provides a starting point when one is interpreting a new and unexpected behavior pattern. For example, if I notice a new soft call emitted by female loons during courtship, I am apt to hypothesize that this call might help mates synchronize their breeding activities so that each will be prepared to do its share of the incubation duties, once eggs are laid. (Such synchronization, which involves rising prolactin levels in the blood, has proved crucial to successful breeding in many species of birds.) So the presumption of selfishness can  be a useful prism through which to understand animal behavior.

A week ago, the folks at REGI learned of an event that pushed even my cynical viewpoint to the limit. Following a report from a lake resident, they found an injured loon on Metonga Lake, which is just south of Crandon, Wisconsin. After Linda and Kevin Grenzer captured the loon (pictured in Linda ‘s photo above) and the REGI team examined and x-rayed it, they learned that it had been shot at close range with a shotgun and had lead shot throughout its body. Despite efforts to save the unfortunate shooting victim, it died in their care. The story might have ended there, except that the loon was banded.

Since Metonga is outside of our study area — some 20 miles east of our southeasternmost lake — we do not know the lake at all. Sleuthing by Linda and me revealed that this oval 2000-acre waterbody supported two breeding pairs in 2018. According to the loon ranger, both pairs hatched chicks this year, although only one of the pairs fledged their two hatchlings. Most important, neither pair contained a banded individual. Thus, the shooting victim was not a member of either resident pair.

Some of the circumstances surrounding the tragic shooting make sense. As many of you know, breeding loon pairs become restless in September and October, often leaving their territorial lakes. Moreover, large, clear lakes like Metonga are favorite spots for wandering adults to visit, as they forage intensively and lay down fat stores to fuel their southward migration. So it is not at all surprising that a breeding adult from a neighboring lake — as we presume the victim was — would be found on Metonga. Finally, virtually all of the loons that we band that show up that far from our study area are females, because females are the more dispersive sex. (On average, females settle 24 miles from their natal lake, while males settle 7 miles from their birthplace.)

The identity of the shooting victim allows us to speculate about its tragic end. When I looked up the band colors and partially-obscured USGS band number that Linda provided, I learned that we had banded this female nine years ago as a chick on Bear Lake in Oneida County. We have not seen her since. The father and mother of this female were among the most approachable loons in the study area. (The male still holds the territory there, as he has since 2001 or earlier.) As Chapman student Mina Ibrahim showed a year ago, tameness (the minimum distance that a resting loon will permit a canoe to approach before diving) is similar between parents and offspring. So it is almost certain that the dead female was a tame individual, like both of her parents.

If our simple inference is correct, then this incident has exposed one hazard of extreme tameness in loons. While the vast majority of humans who approach loons closely are merely curious and would never dream of harming them, an occasional human might do so. It is easy to reconstruct the chain of events that led to the shooting. In the opening week of duck season, a hunter got an easy shot at a duck-like diving bird and took full advantage.

This analysis might well be correct, but it has one hitch. Loons are so well-known across the heart of their breeding range that they can scarcely be confused with ducks. None of the species of ducks that a hunter in northern Wisconsin would be looking to bag is patterned much like a loon. Furthermore, all duck species in the area are far smaller than loons and are prone to fly, not dive, when approached by humans. And since we know that the hunter blasted this loon from very close range, it is even more difficult to believe that the incident arose from a misidentification.

Call me cynical, but I believe that the hunter who killed this loon was not foolhardy, as generous and forgiving people might believe, but rather purposely wicked. Of course, this conclusion further erodes my opinion of other humans. What kind of person deliberately shoots a loon?