Juvenile loons are in a race against time. While their parents seem to relax following the breeding season — wandering from lake to lake as if on a goodwill tour — juveniles, like the three-month-old in Linda Grenzer’s photo, face a ticking clock. After hatching in June or July, juvies must reach near-adult size by ten weeks of age, practice takeoffs and landings, and become strong enough to make flights of hundreds of miles on their southward migration in early November.
They are racing the ice. Temperatures cool in September, become unpleasantly chilly in October, and truly plummet in November — and lake temperatures follow suit. Ice-up can occur anytime between mid-November and mid-December in northern Wisconsin, and ice-up is the end of the line for juveniles. Opportunistic bald eagles await juveniles that are not prepared to migrate and become trapped in the ice. Apparently sensing the desperate task that will confront their offspring in the fall, parents stuff them with fish for eight long weeks in July and August. Chicks grow explosively during mid-summer. But they face their most challenging task in autumn, when parental support wanes and they must learn to feed themselves, improve their body condition, and prepare for their southward journey.
In general, scientists have paid little attention to the juvenile period in birds. Our neglect is natural enough. The breeding season is chock full of interesting behavioral and ecological events: pairing of mates, defense of breeding territories, selection of nest sites, and relentless territorial intrusions by nonbreeding adults seeking to settle. Perhaps ecologists can be forgiven for focusing their attention on breeding behavior and trusting that juveniles will take care of themselves.
But we wondered. If young adults settle on breeding lakes that closely resemble their natal lakes, might juveniles — which must fight for their lives just to become adults — also exhibit clear preferences for certain kinds of lakes over others? Constrained by flightlessness to forage only within the lake where they hatched, we might expect juveniles to become highly specialized to hunt and consume the species of prey found on the natal lake. So once they become capable of flight, we might expect them to visit and forage on other lakes very similar to their natal one. That is, juveniles reared on a diet of bluegill sunfish and used to hunting that species should spend most of the pre-migratory period visiting lakes full of bluegill that they can catch and consume efficiently. And juveniles accustomed to eating snails and leeches should find lakes full of those invertebrates on which they can feast.
Our interest in lake visitation patterns of juveniles during fall inspired us to plot the local movements of youngsters between lakes in the fall of 2012, 2013, and 2014. Kristin, Gabby, and Nathan used their band-spotting skills to locate juvies in September and October of these years. They found close to 200 cases where a juvenile we had marked had flown to forage on a lake other than its own. Using these data, Brian, who joined us this summer, asked, “Do juveniles forage on lakes at random, or do they prefer to forage on lakes like the one that hatched them?”. As the figure below shows, the mean difference in pH between a juvenile’s natal lake and the lake where we spotted it foraging (red vertical line) was far less than the distribution of differences we would have expected, if juvies had foraged randomly (grey bell-shaped curve).
Although Brian has a few statistical checks to complete, the pattern seems clear. Juveniles exhibit strong preference for lakes that resemble their natal one in two respects: 1) pH and 2) water clarity (data not shown). Brian’s analysis is ongoing, and he is trying to learn how closely these chemical and physical attributes predict the food available to loons in a lake. But we are betting that the stark preference of three-month-old juveniles for lakes that remind them of home occurs for a simple reason. Juvies try to spend their time hunting prey in familiar conditions to build themselves up for their most dangerous first southward journey.