2015-06-12 22.17.05

In his routine visit to Two Sisters Lake to check on the status of an incubating pair, Chris was alarmed to find out that the male had a hook lodged in his cheek and fishing line protruding from his bill. This male — captured and marked in 2010 as a breeder on Brown Lake before being evicted two years later — had been a “floater” for the past three years before replacing the absent Two Sisters male this spring. I was thrilled to see this tame bird get his life back together.

When Chris reported the hook in this male’s bill, I wondered if this bird was just snakebit. The entanglement could not have occurred at a worse time. The male and his mate were on the brink of completing four weeks of incubation and hatching of two chicks, which require great care and protection at this stage. Indeed, between yesterday morning and afternoon, the male had finished incubating the second egg and left the nest for good with two head-sized chicks alternately hiding under his wing and riding on his back. Attentive as he was, the hooked male was ill-equipped to defend his brood. As we have learned recently, male loons are especially vital to the defense of a pair’s young chicks, because the male-only yodel discourages landing by intruders (which, on occasion, kill young chicks) and because males are active defenders of chicks towards intruders that approach them in the water. With the hook lodged in his mouth, the male was unable to open his bill, and his protective vocalizations yesterday were so muffled and distorted as to be ineffective.

Upon receiving the report of the hooked male yesterday, we agonized over the decision of how to proceed. Adults with small chicks are the easiest to capture, so we were not worried about catching the male. However, one must take great care when young chicks are present, as they are tiny and are always on, next to, or underneath the wings of the adults. When one is netting the 10 to 12 pound parent and hauling it into the boat, it is conceivable that an unseen chick might be crushed beneath it. Would it be wise to wait for a few days or a week, until the chicks were larger and stronger, before attempting capture? In the end, we decided that the male was impacted enough that we were endangering his life and those of the chicks if we did not act immediately to help him. So last night, Joel, Eric and Seth set out on Two Sisters to try to: 1) gently separate the tiny chicks from the male, and 2) catch the male so that the hook could be safely removed by Mark Naniot of Wild Instincts, who was standing by on shore.

As you can see from Seth’s photo, we caught the male, and Mark expertly removed the hook from his cheek. The chicks were unharmed in the process. The male seemed in good shape, considering his close encounter with an angler’s line. (We suppose that he became hooked only a day or so before we caught him.) Still, we shall be checking today to see that the family is back to normal. While there are many dangers facing loons in the first few weeks after hatching, the team of rehabbers and loon researchers has given them a chance to confront these dangers without human impacts layered on top!

We were horrified last spring, when one of our best-known territorial males — and a super tame bird to boot — became hopelessly entangled in fishing line. This male, the long-term resident on Jersey City Flowage (“JCF”) had swallowed two lead sinkers, and monofilament line was wrapped tightly about his bill, making it impossible for him to eat. In short, the JCF male was destined to perish quickly from lead poisoning and/or lack of food. However, the folks from REGI freed him and used new technology to pluck both lead sinkers from his gut. Although he lost much of his tongue because of the fishing line, we were heartened when Linda found him in July of last year gorging himself on bullheads near his old territory (see photo below). LMG_1395 Jersey Male n Bullhead

But recovery after a brush with death was just the beginning for this bird. In order to reclaim his previous position, the male needed to regain his strength, migrate successfully to his winter quarters, survive the winter, migrate back north, and then — most challenging of all — regain possession of his former territory, which had been quickly snapped up by another male after the injury. (The new male bred successfully last year and was banded by our team.) Yesterday, Linda confirmed that the old, war-torn JCF male has negotiated all of these hurdles and settled in a breeding pair back on his old territory (see Linda’s photo below). We presume that he is also with his old mate, but she is one of the few wily adults that has managed to elude us, despite several efforts at capture. So she is still unbanded. LMG_3377 JCF Male The resilience of the JCF male is important. He is only the third adult to have been severely injured by fishing tackle, lost his territory, and recovered to reclaim it. Three data points can never be a robust sample, but we also have many cases where entanglement occurred and adult loons did not recover. In fact, we have about 9 well-documented cases of death following entanglement, which, combined with the three success stories, yields an estimate of 25% likelihood of recovery. So while the story of the JCF male’s journey from disaster to full recovery lifts our spirits, it is hard to forget that this is the exception, not the rule.