Many of you have e-mailed me to ask, “What became of the duckling reared by loons?” It is a reasonable question. Each passing day during the summer revealed startling new behavioral quirks in the peculiar, touching relationship between these inseparable misfits. Having witnessed well over a thousand loon families — and by this I mean those consisting entirely of loons — I found each of my visits to the Long Lake pair a revelation. Each time I watched male and female loons feed their precious adoptee a fish or warn it about a passing eagle, I involuntarily shook my head. How could two species separated by 70 millions of years of evolution come together into such a tight and successful makeshift family? Every day the family remained together seemed to defy logic.

Yet their familial bond persisted. Following my most recent post on the loon-duckling family, the duckling grew and grew some more. By the end of July (as Linda Grenzer’s photo shows), the duckling was close to adult size, and the only uncertainty was whether or not it would sink its parents by continuing to ride about on their backs. By mid-August, the pair and duckling were spending more time apart. On multiple occasions, we saw the duckling take off and fly around the lake a few times before landing near its anxious guardians. By now fully capable of feeding itself and weeks beyond the normal fledging date for mallards reared by their own species, the duckling seemed to cling to its parents more for their sake than for its own.

By September 4th, the duckling and its loon parents were gone from the lake. We will not ever know where the duckling went or how it lived after leaving Long Lake. Although we could have attempted to mark it in July, as we do loon chicks, I could not bring myself to do so. Even as a scientist fascinated by the behavioral outcome, I was too transfixed by the beauty of the family to capture them and risk disrupting it.