My new team and I are racing around the study area, still catching up to our banded breeding population. At each lake, we record the bands of the female and male, look quickly for any active or failed nests — only in obvious places — and race to the next lake to repeat the process: (“Ok…the female has a yellow band on right and is red over green on left? Good enough….let’s go!”.) The work is frantic and exhausting, and we are only halfway through. We are all so busy covering lakes that there is little time to reflect on what we have seen. I have trouble remembering what lakes we have even visited at the end of each day, so anxious am I to eat a meal and hit the hay for the next 5am wakeup.

Yet some patterns have emerged from our lake visits that remain lodged in my brain. It has been a dreadful first round of nests for most breeding pairs. Typical pairs in the study area abandoned their first nesting attempt three to four weeks ago because of the clouds of flies that descended upon them and have only just begun to renest or think about doing so. Based on what we have seen, it appears that 70 to 80% of all pairs could not stand to incubate the first clutch of eggs they laid in early to mid-May, making 2020 even slightly more devastating a black fly year than 2014, the previous worst year on record. Our study population has seen a steady slide in chick production over the past quarter century; 2020 will only strengthen that demoralizing pattern.

So you can imagine how it warmed my heart to hear about Linda’s loon pair (“Clune” and “Honey”), who managed to buck the trend and stick it out through all four weeks of incubation. At a time when the population as a whole is reeling, the assiduous parenting on display in Linda’s video below took my mind off of the population’s struggles for a moment and reminded me that good things can still happen.