It is springtime. Early spring seems like a child on the first day of school: excited about the change about to occur but fearful, hesitant at the same time. Spring comes with diffidence — one step forward, two steps back, three steps forward, one more step back….
Pity the birds. Trapped between the necessity of returning early to claim a territory and the threat of death by rogue icestorm if they arrive too soon, they push northwards. Loons play an even more dangerous game than most other species. They can only land and take off from large bodies of water. So they must track the coming thaw by hopping from one open lake, river, or reservoir to the next. When they have crept northwards to within striking distance of their breeding territory, they make probing overflights and gauge when it is safe to land and claim the prize that motivated their journey.
At times the glacial northward push by loons can look more like dawdling than caution. So it seemed with Lena, Sheila Johnston’s favorite loon, when, on April 3rd, she stopped to visit Chicago for four days on her return to Upper Gull Lake in north-central Minnesota. She was undaunted by the Sears Tower looming in the distance, the steady buzz of city life, and the throng of nature photographers gawking at her tameness and brightly colored leg bands. But she seemed in no hurry to return to Minnesota.
Alerted by a friend of her arrival, Russ Smith, a birder and photographer, documented Lena’s stay in Diversey Harbor. (The above photos of Lena are by Russ.) Lena found the food delicious, if unvarying. She seemed to take it upon herself to put a dent in the local population of the exotic Rusty Crayfish. She ate dozens of them. When he compares his photos from the four days of Lena’s stay in the Windy City, Russ feels that she showed signs of weariness on her first day that were no longer evident on days 3 and 4. If Russ is correct, then her urban stay near Lake Michigan’s southernmost point was a vital refueling stop for Lena, not just an idle visit.
After four days, Lena moved on. Since Sheila and her team maintain an annual vigil on Upper Gull Lake in anticipation of Lena’s return and have seen no sign of her, we presume that Lena made a short northward flight — perhaps to southwestern Wisconsin or southeastern Minnesota — and is now treating a new set of nature-lovers to close-up views. Sheila Johnston, Terri Rammer, and many others in northcentral Minnesota report that most males and a good many females have now returned to our Minnesota Study Area, near Crosslake. Whether she makes another stop along the way or not, Lena will be joining them soon. As halting as the spring has been, there is now not enough lingering ice to stop her.