My family took a vacation this past week to the East Coast. It was not a typical vacation. We boarded our eastbound flights nervously, wiped our seats obsessively with the comically-small towelettes provided by flight attendants, cinched our masks high over our noses, and glared with disapproval at fellow passengers who failed to do the same. Upon arrival in Boston, my daughter and I waited for three hours in 96-degree heat for a COVID test (both were negative) and then rushed back to the airport to meet my wife and son. Ultimately, though, we all arrived in Vermont for a five-day vacation with family members who could also boast of recent negative tests.

Even without the added stress of coronavirus, I had expected to struggle on this vacation. I loved vacations when I was a child. My parents would throw their four kids into one of those monstrous Chevy station wagons with fake wooden side panels and drive northeast along the interstates from Houston on our annual odyssey to New England. We loved the highways, the motels, the afternoon stops for soda, singing madrigals in the car at night, playing the alphabet game with road signs — and even the adventures we had after occasional tire blowouts. But age has made me hunger for the sound nights of sleep that go with routine and a familiar bed. So when my wife described her plan for a New England holiday — to begin immediately after my daughter and I had buttoned up our canoes and car in the storage box in Rhinelander — I sighed. “Ok”, I said, “that sounds like fun!”.

Despite their many drawbacks, there will always be one big positive about vacations: vacations bring an exciting change of scene. In meeting new people and taking in new sights and smells, you are able to compare — consciously and unconsciously — your vacation spot to what you have seen elsewhere. As a scientist, I appreciate the new connections my brain makes when I move from one location to another.

As it turned out, our visit to Vermont provided an unexpected comparison of two loon populations headed in opposite directions. One of our outings took us kayaking on Kent Pond, near Killington. “Pond” is a misnomer; Kent Pond is a dammed lake that covers 71 acres. According to Eric Hanson, who has been following Vermont loons for almost as long as I have been covering those in northern Wisconsin, the first attempted loon nest on Kent Pond occurred in 2009, and the first chick fledged in 2011. So, Kent Pond — and southern Vermont generally — illustrates how loons can settle in an area, begin to breed, and establish a new population. After I had adjusted to sitting so low in the water and using the quirky two-sided paddle to propel my kayak forward, I joined my daughter and the rest of our party as they sought out the loon pair that inhabited the Pond. We caught up with the tame adults and their two nine-week-old chicks along the northeastern shoreline. The larger chick swam and preened casually and lagged behind the family, while the smaller chick approached and hounded its parents for food unceasingly. Their size and behavior made it clear that these were two strapping chicks. Their wing flaps, moreover, exposed fully adult-sized flight feathers that will soon lift them off of the Pond and permit them to explore other lakes in the area. (I took no photos of the Kent family, but Linda’s photo of a rare two-chick family on her lake is similar.)

After gawking at the two monstrous chicks on Kent Pond for a time, I explored the Pond a bit more and was reminded of one of my study lakes in Wisconsin. Like Kent Pond, Currie Lake is rather round in shape and has two small islands near its center. Like Kent, Currie also hatched two healthy-looking chicks in June 2020. But Currie lost one chick in its first week and the other chick before it reached two weeks of age. In other words, the chick loss this year at Currie exemplifies the current reproductive downturn in the northern Wisconsin population. The two adult-sized chicks at Kent, on the other hand, well represent the Vermont loon population, which continues to grow and expand. (Below is a plot of the size and breeding success of loons in Vermont from the Vermont Center for Ecostudies.)

I am not a bitter person. I try hard to look without jealousy at those more fortunate than myself and be happy for their situation and not sad about my own. But those two big, fat, sassy chicks at Kent Pond — and the population of which they are a part — showed me a portrait of loon ecology that is becoming distressingly unfamiliar.