The Loon Project is my life’s work. While I greatly enjoy teaching Chapman students, serving on committees with my colleagues, and living in southern California, a part of me resides permanently in the Northwoods with the loons.

I inherited my love of loons. Mom introduced me to them in the 1970s when we made trips to Temagami, a deep, clear, sinuous, 30-mile-long lake in central Ontario. “Listen…..do you hear the loons?” she would ask my brothers and me as we lay beneath thick woolen blankets. As a resident of far-off Houston, I recall feeling awe, and some fear, to hear the mournful wails and maniacal tremolos echo across the huge lake. I wondered what messages loons could be sending each other in the middle of the night.

So I guess I was predisposed to study loons when I re-encountered them in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula in 1992. By the time I had finished listening to Dave Evers (then director of the Whitefish Point Bird Observatory) describe battles for territorial ownership that he and his staff had witnessed during their capture and marking efforts, I was hooked. At first, I implored him to conduct further research. “Your observations suggest a cool territorial system in loons, Dave. There are important questions about behavior and ecology to address here.” But Dave’s interest was not territorial behavior. If anyone was going to follow up those exciting early findings, I, a trained behavioral ecologist, would have to do it.

I began my loon study in 1993 and ran the project on a shoestring back in the mid 1990s. Then a postdoc at Indiana University, I really had no business setting aside my work on parentage analysis by DNA fingerprinting – expertise much sought-after by universities at the time – for a logistically-challenging project that required an enormous investment of time and energy. There was no low hanging fruit here. Several years were required simply to collect enough data to publish my first paper.

It took a decade — until 2003 — to pull together a sufficient cluster of banded loons and early findings to convince reviewers at the National Science Foundation that I was doing productive, cutting-edge research. I was awarded additional funding in 2007 and 2012. But funding rates for ecological proposals are now in the 7 to 9 percent range — roughly a third of where they were 30 years ago.

I love my work and have enjoyed learning about loon behavior, ecology, and population dynamics over the past 27 years. The project is more important now than ever before for loon conservation. With the future of loons in Wisconsin somewhat in doubt, our long-term measurement of breeding success and territory occupancy of marked birds in a large, fixed set of lakes provides us with a vital “early warning system” to detect population decline.

I am excited to invite you to support my efforts to learn about loon behavior and ecology while creating educational opportunities for undergraduates. Here is a link that will take you to our brand new “Donate” page. Thank you in advance for any amount you are able to give — and for your commitment to the loons of the Northwoods!