ABJ

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Although it has been over a decade, I still remember that morning vividly. I was observing the banded male and unbanded female on Brown Lake as they foraged on the wide portion of the lake’s eastern side. As is the case with most of our study animals, the loons were quite tame. They reacted indifferently to my red canoe as I tracked their progress slowly down the lake.

The loon pair’s relaxed foraging seemed odd during what had been a most tumultuous year on Brown. Though the female had resided on the lake since April, three different males had vied for and held the position of male breeder for portions of the season. Ultimately, “Mint-burgundy over Silver, Green over Blue-stripe” (Mb/S,G/Bs for short) drove off his competitors and became the male breeder. Evicted from Two Sisters-West in 2008, Mb/S,G/Bs had drifted about for two years before finally seizing control on Brown. Sadly, his victory in late June 2011 came too late for successful nesting to occur. So on the day of my visit, August 3rd, Mb/S,G/Bs and his mate were merely killing time before molting and readying themselves for the southward migration.

As I watched the laid back pair forage, an intruder appeared overhead. The pair watched the intruder as it slowed, descended, and parted the water’s surface to land twenty meters away. The intruder — a female hatched and reared 15 km north on Moon Lake, near St. Germain, three years earlier — was clearly uneasy. She bowed her head, dipped her bill in the water repeatedly as she drew near the pair, and initiated many brief dives as she circled them. For their part, the male and female breeder seemed to be going through the motions. They circled slowly with the intruder and peered at her when she dove but seldom dove themselves. The video below from South Two Lake depicts a similar scenario.

Afterwards I reflected upon the encounter. More clearly than ever before it seemed to me that I was watching a jittery youngster confronting two old, confident territorial loons. I am not sure why it had taken me eighteen years to do so, but I felt that I suddenly understood something very fundamental about loon territorial behavior. Loon pairs watch the behavior of an approaching intruder closely, quickly size it up — estimating the level of threat it poses to their territorial ownership — and then behave accordingly. As a result of this particular lake visit to Brown, my research team began to recognize and record “initiates dive” behavior (i.e. being the first loon in a group to make a short dive) and also “declines dive” behavior (refusing to dive when another loon nearby has done so). These advances led to new data collection and new insights into age-related territorial behavior.

Intruders, we have learned recently, provide ample signals of their age, fighting ability, and level of interest in battling for territory ownership. As the above figure shows, one of the clearest hallmarks of youth among intruders is the “initiates dive“ behavior. Young, timid intruders with no intention of vying for territory ownership are nervous Nellies, like this three year-old female was, and carry out many initiates dives. At the same time, these youngsters almost never show the “simultaneous dive“ behavior (which signals a willingness to escalate conflict), nor do they yodel or show aggression of any kind. Without question, there are dozens of other small signals that territorial pairs pick up from intruders to assess their age and degree of threat they pose.

And territory owners act upon the information they glean from intruders. That is, they treat a harmless visitor within indifference; they behave aggressively toward a dangerous intruder. The keen ability of territory owners to distinguish between intruders helps us understand how they can survive hundreds of intrusions each year without becoming exhausted. They save energy where they can and only get worked up and aggressive when they must.

These conclusions might sound obvious and intuitive. They are. And yet it took some 20 years and dozens of statistical tests to recognize and analyze the age-related patterns in behavior that allowed us to infer how both intruders and pair members betray their motives and strategies during such encounters. Fortunately, our perseverance has been rewarded. A few days ago our paper on interactions between intruders and territory owners was accepted for publication in a good behavioral journal. It should appear in print early next year. Thus, we are incrementally closer to understanding the entire territorial system of common loons.

If you would like to support our work in understanding territorial behavior, measuring population parameters, and conserving loons in the upper Midwest, consider a donation to the Loon Project HERE. At the moment, we are hoping to buy two canoes and a small motorboat, which would allow us to continue our long-term Wisconsin research while adding new lake coverage in our new Minnesota study area in 2022. Thanks for any support you can give us!

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We are not the only people who study loons. In fact, dozens of researchers from Iceland to Montana…from Alaska to Massachusetts…and from British Columbia to Newfoundland have done so. And that is to say nothing of loon study that occurs on the wintering grounds.

Loons are, of course, engaging animals. It puts a spring in my step just to tell people that I study them. And the same is true of dozens of undergrads, Masters’ students, and loon enthusiasts who have chosen to spend time with these odd and fascinating birds.

But spending time with loons and gaining useful knowledge about them are two different things. Much of the basic information about the life-history of the species — where they nest; when they arrive on lakes in the spring; what their predators are — has been understood for some decades. So folks who observe the behavior of loons during the breeding season, even with a keen eye, have a hard time contributing to our knowledge of the species.

There is an exception. Marking of animals for individual identification throws open the door to an abundance of exciting and useful research questions. Once we had marked a few dozen loons in the 1990s and begun to follow their lives closely, we quickly put to rest the abiding — though scientifically implausible — legend about the species: that they mate for life. We now know that a typical adult has several different mates during its lifetime. More profoundly, we now know that loons are decidedly unromantic. A loon’s bond is to its territory, not its mate. When loons fight, they fight to retain their ownership of a territory — and to remain paired with whatever individual of the opposite sex has succeeded in maintaining its own bond with the same territory. Having loons banded has forced us to recognize the shocking fact that established breeders whose mate is evicted by a competitor simply pair quickly with the competitor, leaving their previous mate on its own to cope with the loss (on a new territory).

Marking of loons also exposed a peculiar finding about the species: that males choose the nest site. Since we have breeding pairs marked, we have measured statistically how males take the lead when pairs are nest-searching. More to the point, we have shown that the disappearance of a male breeder causes a territorial pair to “forget” nesting locations that they used successfully in the past.

While color-banding of loons is immensely valuable for behavioral study, it is even more so for monitoring populations. This is easy to understand. Once you start marking animals and systematically working to resight them, you learn at what rate they return annually to breeding territories. Instances of return or failure to return allow us to construct a population model to estimate adult survival. And if resighting efforts take place within a tight cluster of study lakes that are visited regularly, a researcher can refine the population model by accounting for those frequent cases wherein an adult loon failed to return to its lake not because of mortality but because a competitor evicted it and forced it to move to a new breeding lake nearby.

In fact, it is our intensive — almost obsessive — efforts to relocate adults lost from their original territories that makes our study methods unique. The obsession extends to loon chicks as well. That is, we search far and wide to find the breeding territories of loons that we banded when they were four to six weeks old. To date, we have discovered 183 chicks that matured and settled on territories 4 to 11 years later. These data further improve the population model, because they permit us to estimate survival of chicks to adulthood. Linda found our latest case of settlement by an adult-banded-as-chick on Manson Lake just yesterday. She tells me that this is the first instance in which she took a photo of a chick (above photo of the 2013 family on Jersey City Flowage) and then snapped another of that same loon after it had returned as a territorial adult (see photo below of this eight year-old yodeling yesterday on Manson Lake).

We are still going strong in Wisconsin. Each year that passes improves our known-age data on adults and chicks banded as long ago as 1993. This year, though, through a brand new partnership with the National Loon Center in Crosslake, we are bringing our technique of intensive mark and resighting to Minnesota. In the next several years, we hope to share better tidings with lovers of loons in central Minnesota than we shared recently with loon enthusiasts in Wisconsin.

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We always celebrate when someone identifies a new banded adult. “You got an exclusive!”, I say to one of my students, if they nail all bands on a loon that we banded as a juvenile in the study area and have not seen since. In fact, Melanie reported an exclusive ABJ (for Adult Banded as Juvenile) just yesterday; this one happened to be a four-year-old male hatched on Samway Lake that she ID’d on Elna. (Linda’s photo shows an exclusive that she nailed bands on, this one from Soo Lake.)

Sightings of young ABJs are valuable. These loons are all “floaters” — nonbreeding individuals that live on small lakes or parts of large lakes that are not used by breeding pairs — so they live a marginal existence. Still, they provide us with data on juvenile rates of survival and return to the study area, which contribute to mathematical models that tell us whether our population is stable, increasing, or decreasing. Young ABJs are also the future, because these green, reticent individuals — they are notably subordinate when interacting with territorial residents, have low fighting ability, and are well below optimum adult body weight — will ultimately replace our established and well-loved territorial breeders.

I spend most of my research time asking behavioral questions about our long-term territorial residents, which is regrettable, because it leaves young ABJs out. In fact, a vexing question concerning young ABJs has been lurking in the back of my brain for some years now: where do they all go? From the countless small celebrations the students and I have had over the years at new ABJ sightings, an expectation has formed that we would see a vast wave of new territory settlements by this youthful cohort. But it has not happened. Each year only a handful of young ABJs claim new territories by evicting a living territorial resident, replacing a resident that has died, or carving out a new territory where there was not one previously.

This morning I got fed up with waiting around for all of the young ABJs to settle — and looked at the numbers. They are pretty shocking. We have been able to celebrate sightings of 348 young ABJ floaters over the years. That is a lot of loons. Of these, though, only 124 settled on breeding territories and paired with a mate for at least 60 days. And an even smaller number — 94 — nested and hatched chicks. Since most of these individuals were last seen years ago, most died long ago. So only slightly over one-fourth of all young ABJs that returned the breeding grounds ever produced young. Even this rather low fraction is too high, because it presumes that we actually ID all young ABJs that come back to the study area. Clearly a typical young ABJ deals with many challenges — lengthy migrations between breeding and wintering grounds, bouncing around in the study area, probing here and there for territory openings, absorbing attacks and chases at the hands of territory owners — only to fall short in that last, most crucial test: territory settlement.

Why? Why would the rate of failure to settle be 75%, when vacant lakes with a successful record of chick production abound in the study area? If I were a loon (I know….but don’t say it!), I would look around for a prime breeding territory, pick a few fights to try and get one, and then settle for a less-than-perfect but adequate territory, if it came to that. Because failure to settle leads to evolutionary oblivion. That is, we expect that natural selection has acted on behavior in such a way as to maximize breeding success, and breeding success would appear to be maximized not by failing to settle but by settling wherever you can and cranking out as many chicks as possible there.

Of course, it is hubris to think that humans know how loons should behave. Loons have been molded by natural selection and other evolutionary processes for countless generations in a way that virtually guarantees that their behavior leads to high evolutionary fitness. However, as my students in Animal Behavior class know well, there are a few caveats to the expectation of sensible, adaptive behavior by animals. The main one is that rapid environmental change can sometimes outpace the capacity of animals to adapt, causing animals to behave in a way that does not maximize their reproductive success. In other words, if the environment that an animal faces — its predators, competitors, physical environment, etc. — changes so rapidly that the species cannot evolve suitable behavioral adaptations, then we might see animals behaving “foolishly”. So we might surmise that ABJs fail to settle on vacant territories because the availability of vacant territories has only recently increased, and loon settlement behavior evolved during a period when vacant territories were scarce. In effect, then, ABJs would be practicing behavior not suited to the territorial situation that now exists.

While we cannot reject the hypothesis that rapid environmental change has made loons look stupid, it is a bit hard to stomach. The hypothesis posits that young floaters are poor settlers because they are not used to territories being readily available. But whether territories are scarce or abundant, young floaters should have evolved to be able to occupy any available one readily. That is, the capacity to snap up a vacant territory is so fundamental that it is a trait that should be possessed by all young loons, regardless of the territorial environment in which they evolved. There must be a better explanation for the failure of so many young ABJs to settle on territories.

The reason for lackadaisical territory settlement by floaters is probably habitat preference. Some of you may recall that young loons show a peculiar but very strong preference for natal-like habitat. Specifically, young floaters from small, acidic lakes strongly prefer to breed on small, acidic lakes, and those from large lakes of neutral pH try to establish themselves as breeders on large, neutral-pH lakes. Strong habitat preference creates a situation where a young floater reared on one kind of lake does not see vacant territories on another kind of lake as a viable breeding option. If young ABJs are being finicky about the territories they choose to settle on, we should expect to see some “perfectly good” territories go unsettled, as we do. More to the point, we should not be surprised that many floaters fail to settle.

Natal habitat preference might help us understand the seemingly inefficient territory settlement of young floaters, but, if so, it merely shines a spotlight on another vexing question: why do loons strongly prefer to breed on lakes that resemble their natal one? I have speculated about this before, but no satisfactory answer has yet emerged. As we collect more and more survival data, we might find that loons have evolved to take into consideration more than just the potential of a breeding lake to produce chicks. Indeed, settling on a territory like your natal one might mean that you were prepared since day one for that kind of environment and might be able to survive well there. If so, natal habitat preference might allow you to offset with longevity any loss you suffer from settling on a territory that is less-than-stellar for producing chicks. The slow but steady approach of rearing a chick here and a chick there but surviving to a ripe old age might be the one that maximizes lifetime breeding success.

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Mina caught the tail end of the battle. By the time he arrived for his observations, the territorial male on Blue-Southeast was on his heels. No doubt shell-shocked from a beating he had received from an aggressive four-year-old male that had lurked in the neighborhood for two years and was making a play for territory ownership, the territorial male beat a hasty retreat, actually flying off of the lake with another intruder.

The strategic retreat of the territorial male left his mate in dire straits. Without another parent to engage intruders, the female alone had to defend the week-old chick from the aggressive onslaught of the four-year-old male. The situation was hopeless, the suspense only fleeting. The young male quickly discovered the chick and — in the grisliest moment we have observed while studying loons — snatched the chick out of the water and carried it for a time while pursuing the retreating female. When he dropped the lifeless youngster, it was over.

When the shock wears off, we will one burning question about this episode: “Why is Blue-Southeast the site of such frequent territorial controversy?” Can it be coincidence? One must never be hasty to rule out chance, but I think that is not the explanation here. Rather, evictions of the territorial male in 2015 and the same individual again this year resulted from his relatively poor fighting ability. Intruding loons are adept at sniffing out weakness in territorial residents. When a breeding male or female is unable to drive competitors forcefully off of the lake, intruders congregate, leading to further confusion and attempted evictions, in a disheartening positive feedback cycle. The Blue-Southeast male, while a capable parent, has often encountered intruding males that he could not drive off of the territory in years past. It is quite possible that his troubles in 2015 occasioned more territorial challenges in 2016 by the same set of challengers.

I am by nature a rather negative person, always quick to point out the downside of every cheery situation. But I see one bright spot here. If the usurper of the territory and killer of the chick becomes the territorial male, he would appear to be a strong and aggressive individual and one likely to defend the territory with greater success than his predecessor. This 2012-hatched product of nearby Bolger Lake would be a record-setter too, since he would be the youngest male ever documented to seize a territory by force. (Most young males, like very old males, settle on vacant territories rather than fighting their way onto occupied ones.) I wish I could offer more meaningful solace to Blue Lake residents, who will be dismayed at today’s turn of events. The best I can do is to suggest that the future for the Blue-Southeast pair is likely to be brighter than the recent past.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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The first round of censuses in the study area each year is always bittersweet. On the one hand, it is exciting to see the crop of new young adults that have settled and to wonder how well they will defend their new territories. On the other hand, some old familiar loons are missing. This year is typical in that the disappeared veterans are mostly males. Three of 12 males of 20+ years have failed to reclaim their 2015 territory; only 1 of 12 20+ females have not resettled on their territory from the year before. Thus, male senescence lives!

Among the 2016 no-shows are the Jersey City Flowage male, who bounced back from a nasty fishing entanglement in 2014, regained his territory in 2015 and hatched a chick there. Another loss is the Soo Lake male, who was among the most aggressive in our study area. I still tremble when I recall his response when we played a few loon calls in his direction in 2000. He approached my canoe to within 2 feet, sat right next to me in the stern and glowered for the better part of two minutes. A spine-tingling experience for sure!

Yet the news is not all bad. Six young ABJs (“adults banded as juveniles”) have settled in the study area, providing us with valuable data on loons whose age is known precisely. New settlers include two females hatched in Vilas County — a 9 year-old that settled on Manson and a 6 year-old now paired with the male on Harrison Flowage. New male faces belong to an 8 year-old that took over Brandy Lake (near Woodruff) and a 7 year-old that battled and evicted the 22 year-old male from Oscar Jenny. (Thanks to Jeremy, who observed this eviction in progress.)

Perhaps the most intriguing findings from the first round of lake visits by Kristin and Linda are the serendipitous ones. Kristin relocated one of our oldest males — a bird known to be 27 years of age or older. Evicted two years ago from Muskellunge Lake, this loon licked his wounds and got himself back in the game by settling on nearby Swanson Lake, which had fallen into disuse in 2015. We had not seen this bird in two years and were almost ready to give up on him. Linda found a female with even greater resiliency. This old loon produced a dozen chicks over the years as the breeder on Buck Lake from 1998 to 2009. After her eviction from Buck in 2010, she floated, found a breeding position on Hildebrand in 2012 and produced a chick there in 2013. But she was driven off of Hildebrand last year. Her response to this second setback was typical of female loons — she bided her time and claimed that territory again when the opportunity presented itself. As I confront another season of hauling canoes from lake to lake, my back begins to ache in anticipation. I hope the examples of these two dogged old codgers gives me the strength to persevere!

 

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LMG_9628 Manson Lake Male Yodeling

Loons do not settle on territories as we think they should. Traditional models in long-lived animals maintain that hopeful young individuals should be systematic in settling on territories. By current theory, a young loon should explore a certain region within proper habitat, find several territories that might be suitable for breeding, and then routinely monitor those potential breeding spots, waiting for a vacancy to occur. During this exploratory period, it is thought, the young loon gains familiarity with this small cohort of territories that will lead to a competitive advantage in territorial battles with other would-be settlers once a territorial slot opens up. The “foothold hypothesis”, as I call this model, is quite pleasing and logical. What’s more, there is evidence that many territorial animals gain territories in this manner. Loons do not.

We got another reminder of the quirky territorial settlement pattern of loons this past week, when Linda and Kristin scoured the study area and ID’d the pairs that had taken possession of the lakes we monitor. Among these settlers were many familiar faces — including a male on Townline Lake that has been in possession of the territory since 1994 and a female on West Horsehead who has bred there with a series of different males since 1995. One of the surprises was a 9 year-old female hatched on Rock Lake in Vilas County who settled on Manson, replacing a female that had bred on Manson for a dozen years. Owing to Linda’s careful observations, we know this Rock Lake female as a frequent intruder during 2014 and 2015. But she did not intrude into Manson Lake, where she eventually settled; instead she intruded repeated onto nearby Muskellunge Lake! Thus, our expectation that the Rock female was laying the groundwork for settlement on Muskellunge was not fulfilled.

There are several possible reasons why loons often do not settle on lakes that they seem to prefer. One of the most obvious is that settlement is not merely a matter of finding a desirable territory.  A loon bent on settling must also contend with the current resident on a territory where it hopes to settle. So a young nonbreeder that visits Territories A, B, and C might prefer Territory A but be prevented from settling there by a healthy and aggressive territorial resident of the same sex. In that case, the nonbreeder might end up settling on Territory B or Territory C. The Rock female is fortunate; Manson Lake, where she has settled, is one of the most productive territories in the study area. So even if she could not take possession of the territory she seemed to prefer, her future breeding prospects are bright.

You can read more about our testing of the “foothold model” for territory settlement in this blog post, which is based on a paper published in Animal Behavior. E-mail me if you would like a pdf of the paper.

The crisp photo above is by Linda Grenzer. It shows the Rock female performing a wing flap on Manson, her new breeding lake, while her mate, an 18 year-old male, yodels in the foreground.

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LMG_7851 Walter n Sammy

The season began inauspiciously at Crystal Lake in Lincoln County, which is along the southwestern fringe of our study area. Though it is a pleasant, rather clear lake, Crystal offers no nesting habitat for loons. Loons love most of all to place their nests on islands but also make use of boggy or marshy areas, which seem to provide safe havens from egg predators like raccoons and skunks. Crystal offers none of these options, as its shoreline comprises upland habitat and is thus easy for a hungry mammal to patrol. In fact, Crystal is such an inhospitable place for loons to breed that loon eggs vanish from its shoreline almost as soon as they are laid.

So I had mixed feelings to see a six year-old male hatched on nearby Muskellunge Lake settle to breed on Crystal in 2012. On the one hand, I was pleased that the young bird had found a territory after wandering around the local neighborhood of lakes for the three previous years. On the other hand, a settler on Crystal seemed doomed to reproductive failure. But the male and his parade of mates (three females in five years) persisted in their breeding efforts. As I reported earlier this summer, the male and his new mate in 2015 (she still licking her wounds from a recent eviction from neighboring Deer Lake) took a new approach to nesting in 2015 by choosing to place a nest on a swim raft off of a resident’s dock.

LMG_6672 dad n chick on raft

Once the egg had been protected from rolling off of the raft with a ring of rubber cut from an old tire and some natural nesting vegetation (thanks to quick thinking and skillful craftsmanship from Linda and Kevin Grenzer), things began looking up for the breeding pair. Although it was a bear for the male and female to clamber up onto the swim raft to incubate the egg, the setup seemed little different from the artificial nesting platforms that many lake residents place on the lake each year for their nesting pair to use. Given the virtually impregnable location, the probability of hatching a chick had gone from almost zero to near one.

As expected, the chick hatched successfully, and though it had trouble maneuvering around the rubber-reinforced nest (as Linda’s photo shows, above), it left the nest with its parents within a few days. Only when Linda reported that Crystal was experiencing a burst of territorial intruders — one of whom, by chance, was the mother of the Crystal male and hence the grandmother of the chick — did she and I become panicked. Intruders pose a grave hazard to small chicks. Would the pair that had so miraculously pulled off a hatch turn around and lose the chick to an infanticidal visitor? The threat was not trivial. As Linda’s remarkable and chilling photo shows, the Crystal parents broke a very basic rule of loon parenting: never permit intruders near your chick when it is less than 2 weeks old.

LMG_6709 Two intruders approach parent n chick2

Yet the chick survived this brush with death. Nourished by a healthy supply of fish from the lake, the chick grew so rapidly that we were able to band it at three weeks of age, much younger than is usually possible for loon chicks. It has continued to flourish since capture. Now, at roughly 8 weeks of age, it looks like a 10-week-old, as the opening photo attests.

I have a tendency to dwell on disasters. Confronted with a large set of events — some positive, some negative — the latter seem to stick with me longer, leaving me with a sense that things are not going well at present and might not go well in the future. Yet at the end of a season when many breeding loons flirted with disaster — and one died — the story of the plucky Crystal chick stands as an odd and memorable exception.

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“Wow”, Lainey said, “that band number is right next to the female we caught last night on Sherry”. She was right; the adult male from Skunk, which we had just netted and whose band number I was reading aloud to Lainey for data entry during banding, had a number imprinted on his aluminum USGS band that followed immediately after that of the Sherry female from the previous night. The reason for consecutive bands is that the Sherry female is the mother of the Skunk male and was caught and banded with him a decade ago (less two days) on Sherry Lake. I remember July 31st, 2005 on Sherry vividly, because I was equipped with a video recorder on top of a helmet with which we recorded the capture process for research presentations. But the recapture of mother and son on back to back nights ten years after we had first marked them has also caused me to reflect upon several key features of loon biology that have become familiar to me through my work.

First, loons live a long time. In this twenty-third year of my work, I still encounter birds in the study area that were on territory, as adults, when I first started covering them. Females, in particular, are survivors. While males have rather high mortality –partly owing to their proclivity for battling dangerously — females linger. When their mate dies, females find another; when a female is evicted unceremoniously from her territory, she stoically moves to a new lake nearby and awaits a chance to re-insert herself back into the breeding population. So it goes with the Sherry female whose worn-out band from 2005 is pictured on the bottom in the photo. She was “widowed” suddenly in 2009 (a possible eagle kill) but hung onto her territory and was joined by a new male in short order, who has been her mate since.

Second, young males do not disperse far from their natal lakes to breed. The Skunk male, from whom we removed the top band in the photo last night, moved about 15 miles from his natal haunt, Sherry. That dispersal is, actually, a bit longer than average for males, many of whom settle to breed on a lake adjacent to where they hatched years earlier. Short-distance male dispersal is essential to my work; without it, I would not have a large marked cohort of 2 to 5 year-olds of known age and natal origin in the study area at all times whose territory settlement strategies could be investigated. (At last count, we had seen 295 adult loons in the study area that were marked originally as chicks.)

Third, loons vary tremendously in their behavior towards humans. My assistants and I dread the Sherry female, because she is the most skittish individual we know. She cannot be approached easily within 100 meters on the water; she tremolos (i.e. alarm calls) incessantly when a chick is present and a canoe appears on the water. In fact, my assistants tell me that she begins to tremolo in anticipation of a canoe being placed on the water and that they have begun a strategy of hiding behind bushes and trees along the shoreline in order to make observations of her when she is with the chick. (Fortunately, Sherry Lake is tiny, so this observation strategy is workable.) I joked that we should wear camouflaged clothing when visiting Sherry; my assistants did not find this funny. Oddly, the Sherry female’s mate is among the tamest loons we study and never tremolos at us when we collect data there.

The great variety in loon tameness is a topic of great interest to us, as I have mentioned. It amazes me that an adult such as the Sherry female could react so strongly (and, it would seem, maladaptively) to humans, which she encounters constantly. Doesn’t she waste energy with her fruitless calls? Shouldn’t skittish birds like her leave fewer offspring and live shorter lives than other adults who tolerate humans without constant complaint? If so, she is not a good example of the pattern, as she has behaved this way for the ten years we have known her while cranking out chicks. Indeed, the Sherry female and the Oneida-East male, another vociferous but fecund individual with whom my staff has to cope, make me wonder if I have got it backwards. Maybe loud-mouthed loons warn humans away, lessening the likelihood of injury to themselves and their brood, and are rewarded with high evolutionary fitness.

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We are riveted on the happenings on Flannery/Velvet Lakes. On these two lakes –united through a narrow channel so as to be a single waterbody — a tense scene is playing out with elements of a Shakespearean tragedy. A 13 year-old male, hatched on Townline Lake and a frequent intruder into various lakes in and just west of  Rhinelander, is opportunistically seeking to replace the deceased Flannery male. If he succeeds, he would shift from a territory on the Wisconsin River, where he has failed to fledge chicks despite three years’ of nesting attempts, and settle on a new lake that just this year produced chicks, breaking its own eight-year skein of nesting futility. In other words, this would be a step up for the male.

This male’s effort to relocate to a more productive breeding site has taken a dark turn. While visiting Flannery and bonding with the widowed female there, the male encountered her young chicks. One of those chicks the male killed weeks ago by pecking it to death when it was quite small. The surviving chick too has suffered repeated beatings by the male to the point where the chick now spends much of the day hiding underneath piers on Velvet Lake to avoid the abuse. This grisly spectacle has had severe consequences, as the chick is only about 60% of expected body mass for its age. Clearly the physical beatings the chick has suffered, the presence of only one parent, and the inability of the female to feed her surviving offspring to satiation while defending him from intruders threaten his survival. It remains highly uncertain whether the chick will reach adulthood.

I had expected that the dreadful treatment of the Flannery/Velvet chick by an intruding male would make me feel a gut-level hatred of the intruder. Indeed, I was horrified by the fiasco unfolding there. But knowing that the male wreaking this havoc is an old friend of ours — one that I watched as a chick on Townline Lake back in 2002, a young floater on Langley, Julia and Hanson lakes, and finally a failed breeder on Wisconsin River — has complicated my perspective. I am rooting strongly for the chick to survive the vicious onslaught, start to forage for itself, and fledge. But I am also cheering a young male loon who is trying to turn his life around by moving into a new territory that offers the promise of abundant fatherhood.