Sometimes I feel like a voice in the wilderness. Since learning in 2019 that the common loon population of Wisconsin is on a downward trajectory, I have shared this ill news with everyone who will listen. I feel that if people understand the degree of decline and understand further that the decline has only grown worse since my first publication on the issue, they will help me work to turn things around. Yet few folks to whom I impart this message seem to show an appropriate level of concern — in my view.

Of course, Minnesota has been deja vu all over again. While early years of our Minnesota work showed that breeding success in Crow Wing and Cass counties was low — like Wisconsin — we could not speak confidently at first about other aspects of population dynamics in our Minnesota Study Area. In particular, we could not be certain that the most alarming aspect of the Wisconsin decline — the sharp die-off of young adults 2 to 4 years of age — had crossed state lines. But by 2024, we observed only one of the chicks we had banded in our Minnesota Study Area — a worrying sign. After last year, only 4 of 64 Minnesota chicks had been observed as adults. As of this moment, we have confirmed the return to the breeding grounds of 9 out of 87 chicks banded in Minnesota. The 10.3% rate of chick return is quite close to the 12 of 96 chicks (12.5%) that have returned in our Wisconsin Study Area during the same period. Both figures are far short of the “normal” rate of 35 to 40% of all chicks returning that we had recorded in the early 2000s.

In short, loon chicks are simply not surviving to adulthood anywhere near as well as they did two decades ago. Indeed, they are returning at 1/3 the rate they used to. This very ugly pattern is the nub of the KARE-TV story that Samie Solina and Mitch Yehl produced on our work that was broadcast on August 6th and can be viewed here.

I still cannot help feeling like a voice crying in the wilderness. But, thanks to Samie’s and Mitch’s excellent segment, that voice was heard recently by some viewers in the Twin Cities and elsewhere. Maybe they will tell their friends.