I will admit it: I am flabbergasted. When the Bass Lake pair hatched three chicks in the first week of July, I never gave them a chance. I suppose my pessimism was, in part, an attempt to protect myself from further disappointment. This year, as I have mentioned, has been a forgettable year in our study area. The dust has not yet settled completely, but 2019 will certainly go down as the worst year for chick productivity since I began the study in 1993. And we have had some dreadful breeding years!

The Bass Lake Miracle — hatching and rearing of three vigorous chicks on a tiny lake — is so far a welcome exception to the dreary pattern. As I noted in my previous post, however, the Bass Lake pair are fighting more than the negative tide of 2019. Lakes that you could throw a baseball across — well, lakes that Trevor Bauer could throw a baseball across — generally do not contain enough food to allow two chicks to reach fledging size, let alone three. Fawn Lake is a case in point. Slightly larger than Bass, Fawn hatched two chicks, which weighed 2.1 and 1.2 kilograms at capture ten days ago. So the smaller chick is just over half the weight of its sibling, and its survival prospects appear grim. Moreover, Evelyn reported that the beta chick was begging fruitlessly for feedings from the male today, while its fat and sassy sibling rested nearby. Such is the normal state of affairs for families that try to raise more than one chick on small lakes.

But don’t tell all of this to the over-sized Bass Lake family. As Linda’s recent photo shows, the trio of chicks there are beating the odds so far. During my visit to the lake today, the three-week-old chicks swam along in a tight group, tracking their foraging parents and getting fed constantly. The food items brought up by the parents were not tiny minnows and leeches, such as one often sees on smaller, food-stressed lakes, but crappies and yellow perch large enough that the chicks had to work a bit to swallow them. There was no desperate begging, no pecking of the small chick by its larger siblings. Most important, the size disparity among the chicks, quite evident a week ago, is less so now, which suggests that all chicks are receiving ample feedings.

I retain some healthy pessimism about the loon family on Bass. I have seen too many starved chicks on small lakes to feel otherwise. But if a pair of loons can adopt a mallard duckling, raise the duckling on fish they catch and feed to it, and teach it to dive as they do, I suppose anything is possible.