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Sometimes on our research project, we observe a rapid series of nasty events that defy explanation and really shake us up.

This happened to my field interns in Wisconsin. They were “roving” outside our normal study lakes, visiting lakes that are either on the fringes of our 110-lake study area or with little past history of supporting loons. On July 8th, Sarah and Claudia found an adult with a fishhook hanging out of its head on the left side, behind and below the ear. Sarah, Claudia, and Chris covered Little Bass Lake on the following day — and found what appeared to be a second loon with the exact same problem.

We have seen dozens of angling casualties at this point, but we had never seen two weird and very similar hookings in rapid succession. Our puzzlement increased one day later, when Claudia was alone on Dorothy and saw a third loon hooked in this peculiar and painful way. (The featured photos at the top are hers.)

When Claudia contacted me and Linda Grenzer and described what she had seen, we had brief paranoid thoughts, “Oh my god; someone is systematically casting at loon’s heads and hooking them!” (Linda tells me this has actually happened before.) Or, on a deeper rung of paranoia: “Someone is capturing loons, sticking hooks in their heads, and releasing them.”

Repeated visits to the three lakes by our team shed more light. When Linda and her husband, Kevin, attempted to capture the hooked Buffalo bird, they did not find it on the lake on one night. Linda and Kevin also observed what they are confident are two different loons with very similar hookings on Little Bass Lake on two separate nights.

Here is what I conclude. First, these are young birds — probably floaters — but clearly not territorial birds with strong ties to these lakes. They are doing what loons do between ages 2 and 7: they are drifting about but staying in the same general area. If you scrutinize the photos above, it seems apparent that the 1st (Buffalo) and 3rd loons (Dorothy) are the same. Each shows a hook embedded in the loon’s head in the vicinity of the left ear, a fishing snap and swivel hanging off of the hook, and no fishing line attached to the swivel. But the feathers obscure the wound itself. On the other hand, the middle photo from Little Bass shows what appears to be open, inflamed tissue, again with a naked snap and swivel dangling from a hook or lure. Linda and Kevin think that the middle loon is certainly a different bird. I think it might be the same bird, even though the wound looks different. Either way, the loon(s) are dealing well with what appears to be a severe injury, because they are flying from lake to lake and intruding into breeding territories (Dorothy), as they should be.

Speaking of coping well with injury, we had another unpleasant angling event in northern Wisconsin during the past week. A male marked by the DNR eleven years ago on a territory near Three Lakes became incapacitated and was taken for treatment by Wild Instincts in Rhinelander. Their X-ray photo reveals the problem — this bird has a treble hook lodged in its gizzard. The bird has bounced back and been released at this point, but the nasty treble hook and attached line is still inside him. (Removal, of course, would have involved extensive surgery likely to harm the bird further.) We can only hope that the male’s digestive system will grind down and pass these hooks eventually, as we have seen in other loons.

In short, loons have taken some hard punches recently, as we have come to expect at this peak fishing time. If they are lucky enough to avoid the death sentence of a swallowed lead sinker or jig, they can be remarkably resilient.

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Although most of our research team is long gone by September, Linda and Kevin Grenzer remain in Wisconsin. At a time of life when most folks widen the dimples in their BarcaLoungers, these two are devoting their time to rescuing injured birds. (Linda, of course, is also one of our field team members and a gifted photographer to boot!)

Linda and Kevin have gotten more proficient at rescue in recent years. Four years ago, they often found themselves hours from home on some false alarm — an eagle that was heat-stressed but recovered; a loon that seemed wounded but was merely preening. These days they insist on seeing photos or getting vivid descriptions of injured birds from experienced observers before setting out to save them.

After Ken and Joanne Lubich sent us the photo at the top of the page, it was clear that a bird was in trouble. The Lubiches keep a close eye on the two loon pairs on eyeglass-shaped Two Sisters Lake. On a routine patrol around the lake on September 13th, they were horrified to see that one of the two strapping chicks on the east lake had a huge muskie lure attached to its left leg and was swimming erratically.

It might seem difficult to find the positive here, but, in fact, this chick was fortunate. The Lubiches keep a close eye on the loons on Two Sisters and have a network of contacts who live on the lake. Thus, the distressed chick was found only a day or so after being hooked. Furthermore, Joanne and Ken know Linda and Kevin and immediately reported the hooked bird to folks who could help it.

Once they made it to Two Sisters yesterday, Linda and Kevin were able to capture the distressed chick, when it ventured close to shore. A quick inspection told them that at least two of the hooks on the lure had punctured the chick’s foot tissue and become infected. They decided to transport the bird to REGI for treatment.

As is evident from the photo below, we had captured and banded this chick. On the night of capture, July 13th, the bird weighed 2460 grams. Yesterday, the chick weighed 2470 grams, which means that it was only 10 grams heavier yesterday than it had been two months before. This tells us that the bird has lost a great deal of weight — perhaps 500 to 600 g — owing to the hooking. Needless to say, loons go downhill quickly when they are prevented from feeding themselves. This bird probably fed little or not at all for six days.

The world is looking brighter for this chick. Multiple hooks were removed from its foot. One hook was too close to a bone to remove and had to be left in the bird. (REGI staff hope that swelling in the foot will push the hook out in time.) If its injured left leg recovers, and it becomes fully mobile again, the bird will be released in a few days back on Two Sisters. Meanwhile, this loon is taking full advantage of the favorable fishing conditions provided in its temporary home!

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We have been out all night for the past week capturing and marking adult loons and chicks. It is tiring work. Last night, for example, we had to carry our 14 foot motorboat off of a highway shoulder and into Sunday Lake. Next, we hefted it down a long flight of steep stairs, out a long narrow dock and into a marsh to reach the Minocqua-Huber Bay territory. My back still aches! But these visits were productive. In both cases, we captured a male hatched in the study area, his unmarked mate, and their two chicks. So our strenuous efforts were rewarded. (The Sunday male is a fifteen-year-old who was hatched on Seventeen Lake; the Minocqua male is only six and was reared on Brandy Lake.)

Our third lake of the night has a public landing. It was a breeze to back the trailer up and slide the boat into the weedy, pike-rich waters of Little Bearskin Lake. For a change, we were not sweating profusely and breathing hard as we began our improbable search for the pair and their young. However, we were not prepared for what we discovered.

The visit began routinely. We motored slowly to the middle of the lake to listen for the birds, as we often do. Within a minute, a bird wailed in the southeast corner. We were thrilled, because we seemed to have found the family quickly. The loon that had called was, in fact, only the female from the pair, who had wandered off separately from the male and chicks. Nevertheless, she responded strongly to our chick calls and was easy to scoop out of the water. As we removed her from the capture net, we were alarmed to find that she had a fishing lure and monofilament line wrapped tightly around her left leg.

Fishing line is unkind to wildlife. The very properties that make it attractive to anglers — its strength and thinness — give fishing line the ability to cut deeply and mercilessly into the flesh of animals unfortunate enough to become entangled in it. As the photo above shows, the female’s left leg was tightly wrapped, and a lure and hook had become attached to her leg.

Linda was able to cut away the line that had pierced the scaly, keratinized outer layer of the female’s left leg (see video below) and remove the attached lure. We are concerned about the raw tissue that was exposed by this piercing, but Linda applied antibacterial ointment, and we are hopeful that she will recover.

An injury to any loon is painful, but this one was doubly so. This mother of two chicks is the second oldest loon in our study area. She is at least 31 years old! First marked in 1996 on West Horsehead, she raised 19 chicks with three different males on that lake but was evicted in 2018 and fell off of our radar. We were delighted to see that she had resettled on the very productive Little Bearskin territory this spring with the 18 year-old male there. The two healthy chicks she has raised with him provide further evidence that females retain the ability to produce young during their later years.

But we worry. At 3500 grams, she is 250 grams or so lighter than when we captured her several years ago. This, the fact that she had left the male to care for the chicks last night, and the odd not-quite-wails that she uttered after we released her might indicate that she has been compromised by this angling injury.

In fact, she and we were extraordinarily lucky. Most “off-chick” adults — those not tending their chicks — are difficult to find at night and capture. Only the fact that we stumbled into her before we found the male and chicks allowed us to catch her, free her from the tightly-wrapped fishing line, and treat her injured leg. Now, at least, she has a fighting chance to resume her parental responsibilities, regain lost weight, return to her Florida winter quarters — and perhaps return again in 2022.

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In my last post, I told only half of the story of the explosion of the Cunard family — the cheerful half. If you read that post, you know that, following the eviction of the Cunard male and abuse or neglect of the chicks by the evicter, one chick made a daring 1/4-mile trek across land to Hasbrook Lake and is now happily ensconced in that loon family.

The other Cunard chick was not so fortunate. In fact, following interviews of campers and the camp steward, we now know that a day or so before the eviction that led to the desperate dash of one chick to Hasbrook, its sibling had swallowed the live bait and hook used by a camper. As he described it to me, the fisherman panicked and did what most do when they have hooked a loon: he cut the line. I discovered the aftermath of this hooking. The thoroughly consumed remains pictured above suggest that the injured chick became weak, took refuge on shore (as seriously injured loons do), and was attacked and killed by an opportunistic mammal or scavenged after death. Its four leg bands confirmed its identity; the threaded line and fishing snap I found confirmed the cause of death. So the eviction that occurred on July 30th and 31st was actually the second unfortunate turn for the Cunard pair during the last three days of July.

We have discovered several such hookings during our study, despite the fact that anglers do not trumpet them. Perhaps we should take a moment to describe what to do when a loon takes your hook. The best outcome is removal of the hook by the fisherman. Removal of the hook gives the loon a good chance to survive the encounter. Cutting the line, on the other hand, frees the angler but leaves the hooked loon with a death sentence. A hooked loon (or other animal) on the end of a cut fishing line has to contend with a hook or lure that it probably cannot dislodge on its own. Its feeding impaired or prevented altogether, a hooked bird will probably succumb to starvation or predation resulting from its weakened condition. The second best outcome is to cut the line and immediately inform a local wildlife official of what has happened so that he or she can get help for the bird. In many cases, a hooked bird can be captured and de-hooked by me or someone else trained to do so. In other words, if you cut, don’t cut and run. Those of us who study and love loons will do our best to save one that is in trouble.

The Cunard chick’s death is a case in point. Had we known about the hooking, we would have had little difficulty re-capturing the chick and likely removing the hook as well. In that case, Hasbrook Lake might have ended up with four chicks rather than settling for three!