funding

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The past month and a half have been a roller coaster ride, though mostly downwards. Six weeks ago I learned that major funding for my field work in Minnesota had dried up. I cursed my luck. I scratched my head. A thousand “what ifs” passed through my brain.

But looking back was pointless. In time, my mind began to turn to one cheerful and unassailable fact. Loon Project field teams in 2021 and 2022 had given their all to expand our database into a new state where, initially, we knew almost no one. As we began to meet the warm, supportive, loon-loving folks of Minnesota, we gained momentum. The National Loon Center provided tons of support, financial and logistical. New friends shared boats, gave us access to private lakes, towed our capture boat from lake to lake in the middle of the night, or simply drove us around in their own boats during capture to help us find and mark breeding loon pairs. Kevin Kenow and his USGS colleagues spent six long nights in 2022 capturing loons to swell our study population. When the dust settled in early August of last year, we were well over halfway to our goal of establishing a Minnesota Study Area on par with our traditional study area in Wisconsin.

That we have not been diverted from that path is a tribute to our great pool of friends and supporters in Wisconsin, Minnesota, and across the U.S. One day a few weeks ago was a first turning point. An anonymous friend from Wisconsin pledged $7,000 “to support the Minnesota part of the Loon Project”. I was touched that someone in Wisconsin trusted me with this gift, and moreover, dedicated it not to the loons of their own state but to those of an adjacent one. *

Just yesterday, another group of donors from Minnesota helped us reach another turning point. Roger and Phyllis Sherman, Don Salisbury, and Gwen Myers have together contributed $21,000 to the Minnesota Loon Project to establish the Judith W. McIntyre Fund to support our work in the state.

It is a great honor to feel that I am building upon Dr. McIntyre’s seminal work on loons, which took place in Minnesota, Saskatchewan, and Upstate New York. Judy had a gift. She did robust, impactful science that taught us a great deal about loons. At the same time, she was able to convey her passion for loons and loon conservation in a charming, down-to-earth manner that reached the public. I have a dog-eared copy of her classic book, “The Common Loon: Spirit of Northern Lakes” on my shelf to which I often refer. When I think back to my interactions with Judy, though, what I remember most vividly is the warmth and humility with which she welcomed me to the fellowship of loon biologists back in the mid-1990s. She viewed the study of loons as a calling to which all could aspire — even the young whippersnapper that I then was.

The new Judith W. McIntyre Fund is a timely and exciting development. This gift adds to the dozens from other supporters of the Loon Project from Alaska to Colorado to Maine who have stepped up to donate during our time of greatest need. And I cannot forget other folks who have provided the Loon Project team with lodging in Wisconsin (especially Skip and Ruby, Mary, and Linda and Kevin) and Minnesota. Friends and supporters have truly kept the Loon Project afloat in recent years. Gifts earmarked for Minnesota have now brought us right back to where we were before the loss of funding six weeks ago. In other words, thanks to all of you, our goal of producing a robust population model for loons in north-central Minnesota is back on the horizon.

Since I view many events in my life through the prism of my study animal, I cannot help but recall at this moment the plight of the former male loon on Jersey City Flowage, near Tomahawk, Wisconsin. (See Linda Grenzer’s photo of him, above.) Banded as a chick on Swamp Lake (9 miles away) in 1995, “Red/Red, Red/Silver” had easy-to-read bands and a relaxed disposition to match. During each spring for over a decade, I looked forward to seeing his bright color bands under the surface as he permitted us to approach him closely for identification. But he was suddenly at death’s door in June of 2014 after swallowing two lead sinkers attached to a fishing line. If not for the quick and professional work of the Raptor Education Group, he would have been doomed to a slow and painful demise. The REGI folks removed the sinkers, patched up his lacerated tongue, fed him all of the suckers he could swallow, and quickly got him back in the water. Defying the odds, R/R,R/S recovered his lost body mass, migrated southwards in the fall of 2014, and returned to breed the following April, as laidback as ever. He must have felt then as I do now.

I know what you are thinking: another feel-good story of overcoming adversity that features loon/human parallels! Now that we are back in business in Minnesota, perhaps I will plague you less often with such tedious anecdotes. But things have been going pretty well lately. So I can’t make any promises.

* As I noted in an earlier post, research in our traditional Wisconsin Study Area will proceed as before. That is, we will continue to build the Minnesota Study Area without compromising our productive long-term study of loons in Wisconsin.

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One often hears that clear water is a benefit to loons — if not an outright requirement. The entry for the “Common Loon Habitat” section in Birds of the World, for example, opens with “[Loons] prefer clear lakes….”. The Cornell Laboratory of Ornithology’s page dedicated to the common loon begins with: “The eerie calls of Common Loons echo across clear lakes of the northern wilderness”.

An association between loons and water clarity seems reasonable. After all, loons are visual predators. Why would they spend time in water through which they cannot see?

Yet I learned in Wisconsin in the mid 1990s that loons do not strongly favor clear water. While many of my study lakes, like Alva and Two Sisters, are quite clear and produce chicks regularly, many others, such as Hancock and Oneida, are both turbid and productive. In short, loons in the Upper Midwest thrive and fledge chicks on lakes that vary between 3 and 20 feet of visibility. Indeed a scientific analysis showed that water clarity is not among the factors that dictates use of a lake by loons.

If you think about it, you can understand why a migratory species like the common loon does not overspecialize on water of a certain clarity. As we know from Kevin Kenow’s work, loons fly hundreds of miles across largely unknown terrain and then must land on a waterbody somewhere. If they are in desperate need of a meal at such times — as we might presume — they had better not be too finicky about the menu and the eating conditions. Flexibility must be especially important among juveniles migrating south for the first time, who are crossing terrain that is entirely unfamiliar to them and must find food nevertheless. And, of course, migration begins or ends in the Gulf of Mexico or Atlantic, where both diet and water clarity are entirely different from that during the summer months.

Wait. I posted a blog in the spring detailing the importance of water clarity to loon foraging success and explaining how rainfall was washing material into lakes and reducing clarity to loons’ detriment. Am I now taking that back? No indeed! Water clarity IS important to loon families in July. At that time of year, loon chicks gain mass much faster if the water is clear, and their adult parents maintain body mass better when water is clear. But further analysis has revealed an additional factor that is not so straightforward. I learned just a few weeks ago that loon chicks and their parents actually show lower mass in July in lakes that have high long-term clarity. That’s right; loons have higher masses when short-term water clarity is high but lower masses when they are in normally-clear lakes!

Just to be very plain here, I am saying that short-term water clarity (during the month of capture) increases loon masses because they probably see their food more easily, but some factor related to long-term clarity (how clear the water is on average, over many years) actually makes it harder for loons to put on mass. How do we make sense of this brain-twister?

We can only speculate about the long-term water-clarity-related factor that hinders loons’ foraging. However, there is a prime suspect. Human recreation is strongly correlated with lake water clarity. In other words, people like to spend time boating, fishing, and swimming in clear lakes. During the time when loon parents are trying to stuff their chicks with food, we humans are out there complicating the process by frolicking about in their vicinity. It seems quite plausible that this burst of human activity causes loons to lose precious foraging time and perhaps also access to their favorite foraging spot, if humans are using it. So we can easily see how human activity might cost loons some food and thus reduce mass.

If I am correct that humans impair loon foraging in clear lakes, then we can count breeding on a clear lake as a mixed blessing for loons. Clear water makes food easy to see and catch, but it brings hordes of humans that loons and their young must avoid — which cancels out a good deal of this advantage. Now, if a loon pair were to breed on a lake that had clear water and was inaccessible to humans, they would have it made! Sadly, this seldom happens in our neck of the woods.

In addition to this cool but somewhat distressing news about loon biology, I have distressing and not at all cool news about the Loon Project. We have just lost our primary funding source and are therefore going to be a bit tight for 2023 and perhaps beyond. I am hoping to use a “rainy day fund” to make it through 2023 in Wisconsin. Continuation of the work in Minnesota, which we began only two years ago, is now very much in doubt. If you can consider a donation to help us fight through this lean period — so that we can continue to learn about loon biology in ways that might help preserve the Upper Midwest loon population — we would really appreciate it.

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Photo: The male of the Little Pine-Dream Island breeding pair spent a good deal of time off of the nest in late May of this year, because of black flies. He and his mate fought off the flies, incubated their eggs and fledged two chicks this year. Little Pine Lake, on the Whitefish Chain, is relatively clear, and the male’s purple and white bands are easy to make out.