There was no good reason for the Crystal female to defend her nest. I had confirmed the colored leg bands on her mate, and he was no longer the male with whom she had mated and laid eggs on the platform. Instead, he was the neighboring male from Halfmoon, who had left there under mysterious circumstances. Lake residents had reported a “ruckus” early this morning, and that ruckus had turned the 14-year-old male who had been her steady partner for 5+ years (lake residents had nicknamed him “Walter” — not after me but after the largemouth bass in “On Golden Pond”, which features loons) from an expectant father into a displaced, childless nonbreeder. Walter’s eviction meant that any ongoing reproductive attempt was over, as evicting males and females have no interest in incubating eggs or feeding young that are not their own. Yet the Crystal female — lake residents named her “Katherine” because of Katherine Hepburn in “On Golden Pond” — felt an inescapable attraction to the nest. As I approached to inspect the four defunct eggs on the platform, Katherine showed classic nest defense, swimming twice under my canoe. The evicting male from Halfmoon preened indifferently 100 meters away, as if willing to indulge his new mate’s obsession with her past nest but hoping she would get over it soon.

I witnessed a related behavior pattern on Swanson Lake just yesterday. There a mammalian predator (probably a raccoon, according to a camera study conducted some years ago by the Wisconsin DNR) had taken the two eggs that the Swanson lake female had laid in a second nest on the west end of the lake to replace those abandoned during the black fly period (see photo). When I arrived at first light, the female was alone, wailing intermittently, as loons do when their partner is not present. Forty minutes after I arrived, the male flew in, and he swam purposefully over to the newly-failed nest and climbed onto it. For three minutes he sat contentedly on the nest, as if all was good in the world. Then, he stood up on his legs and reached his bill downwards to turn the eggs, as loons habitually do. He seemed to put two and two together when he found no eggs to turn; afterwards, he sat only a few moments more before climbing down off of the empty nest and joining his mate in the water.

Despite 28 years of observation, I had never witnessed loon behavior that reflected slowness or inability to adjust to a new, stark reality — or perhaps I had simply not seen such behavior twice in so short a time, which made it impossible to ignore. As humans, of course, we have all behaved in such a way. That is, we have forgotten for a moment that some abrupt, fundamental change has occurred in our lives and mistakenly acted as we had before the change. Over a longer timescale, I find myself behaving so now. On each visit I make to a study lake in mid-June I expect to see young loon chicks or a pair late in the four-week incubation stage and on the brink of a hatch. But like the Crystal female and Swanson male, I find myself slow to adapt to a new reality — almost universal abandonment of first nests, many pairs without chicks or nests, and a great big dent in the breeding success of the population.