Many people have an attraction to the loon that is decidedly abnormal. I know many otherwise intelligent and sensible people who surround themselves with loon ”trinkets,” give money to various loon causes and speak of little else but loons in the privacy of their lakeshore cabins. And a few, like Katharine Hepburn in ”On Golden Pond,” try to talk to loons. Maybe some even succeed.
Over the past few years the loon has become the symbol for the ”northern experience”–a mystique that draws thousands of urban refugees from the concrete caverns of New York, Detroit, Chicago, Milwaukee and Minneapolis north to Loon Country.
It is evident that a ”loon religion” is evolving in many northern lake communities. The annual Loon Festival on the shores of Lake Winnipesaukee in New Hampshire is a sign of the times, as is the popularity of a record album called ”Voices of the Loon.” In Mercer, Wis., the faithful have even constructed a 19-foot ”idol” of their favorite bird.
”I suppose this will sound a little silly to most people,” says Julius Dinger, a real estate appraiser who summers at Hurd Lake, just north of his Eau Claire, Wis., home, ”but when I pass away, the music I want at my memorial service is the call of the loon.”
Many people clearly recall their first experience with loons, and people almost always remember the first time they heard loon music. I`m slightly embarrassed to admit I don`t. Though boyhood trips to northern Wisconsin produced a few loon encounters, nothing special happened. It wasn`t until August of 1965 on the Minnesota-Canada border that loons grabbed my soul. With Bill Richtsmeier, a high school buddy, I drove to Moose Lake, a little ways north of Ely, to start a Boundary Waters adventure. After a long day`s paddle and portage, we made it to Louisa Falls at the bottom of Agnes Lake, just over the Canadian border.
The loons on Agnes Lake called that night, probably no louder nor more often than they do on any other August night. But the calling found the right spot. We sat by the campfire bewitched, anticipating two weeks of granite cliffs, water diamonds on the shimmering lakes, firm lake trout, spongy sphagnum moss and quiet evenings with the voices of the wilderness. It was a magical night. . . nothing has been the same for me since.
Loons spoke very clearly to Joe Anderlik. A retired paper company executive living in Arlington Heights, Anderlik heard the loon`s call as a boy. He even remembers the year–1929. It was a sound he would never forget, a sound that would draw him back to the north country many times. Now instead of stolen days up north, Anderlik spends every summer at his lake home near Lac du Flambeau in northern Wisconsin. He begins his daily routine at 4 in the morning, when he goes to his workbench and starts carving, you guessed it, loons. He loves every minute of his work, and his carvings show it. Joe has found his niche in loon country.
Having watched many people fall for loons, he sees a definite pattern:
”People come up north from the city and hear this strange bird. This creates a lodestone. They carry the memories, often for years. Eventually they start spending more and more time up north. Pretty soon, they`re living up here. Once they fall in love with loons, it`s forever.”
There are thousands of people like Joe scattered around the northland. It`s difficult to separate their love for loons and their love for the place loons happen to be. It could be that loons reinforce for people their image of the north country. The similarity of some of the northern lakes of Maine and Minnesota or of New Hampshire and Wisconsin is remarkable; all loon country exudes that northern beauty. But maybe the question is moot, loons and loon country being one, symbol and substance, player and stage–a captivating creature in a magical land.
Why? What is so enchanting about a stout black and white bird that likes to call when most people like to sleep? Part of the answer might be the distance loons and people have traveled together. In the 1983 film ”Quest for Fire,” set in the dawn of human origins, loon calls were used extensively in the soundtrack. It was a forgettable film, but it had one memorable scene depicting a band of primitive humans stopping to listen to that call, so familiar yet so haunting. No one knows if half a million years ago the loon`s call was the same sound that echoed last summer around Squam Lake in New Hampshire or Saganaga Lake in Ontario. But it could have been.
If the call of the loon goes back to our first days as humans, the strong feeling of deja vu many people experience when hearing loon calls would be more understandable and the pull of loon magic would be a bit less mysterious. The late writer and naturalist Sigurd F. Olson often wrote about ”racial memory,” the ability of a person to recall, however vaguely, the common thoughts, feelings and experiences of ancestors from thousands of years ago. The Romantic poets of the 19th Century understood the concept. So do people who accept the concept of reincarnation.
Loons are the first birds on the American Ornithologists Union`s (AOU)
Checklist of North American Birds, and by no coincidence. The checklist is a phylogenetic ranking, a listing of birds from the lowest, most primitive orders to the highest, most recently evolved orders. (So loons) are the oldest living birds, having an ancestry dating back 50 to 80 million years. The oldest loon fossils date back 20 million years.
In Ojibwa Indian lore, the loon was not just another bird but the first act of creation, when the very voice of the Creator echoed across the void and became embodied in a gray and black shadow, the spirit of the loon. Longfellow praised Hiawatha with a reference to loons. The very first accounts of the chemistry between loons and people, however, were not written by Longfellow nor told by Native American storytellers; they can be seen in the granite outcroppings of the Canadian Shield, north of the Great Lakes. Crude pictographs of loons still grace some of those rock faces. Anthropologists know only that some people lived in the region about 8,000 years ago, following the edge of the great ice sheets. Whether these peoples–or succeeding cultures–painted loons on granite cliffs, we just don`t know.
The Cree of northern Canada believed the loon`s call was the cry of slain warriors calling back to the land of the living. Probably no native people have more references to loons in their folklore than the Eskimo. The existence of more than 30 different Eskimo names for the four species of loons speaks to their importance. For some Eskimos, the loon was sacred.
Loon music is primitive, reaching into obscure recesses of the human mind. For some people, loon calls might reach down a little too deeply. A few years ago a resort owner in northern Wisconsin told me the story of a Chicago couple who spent just one night in a lakeside cabin and checked out early the following morning. The loons just ”got to them,” he said. Apparently they felt more secure in the jungles of the Loop.
Loon vocalizations ”get to” a lot of people. There is something about loon music that unleashes the poet in many people. Despite his lofty reputation as a philosopher, Henry David Thoreau was often a stiff, pedantic writer, producing endless paragraphs about the number of nails in his cabin. But when Thoreau writes about loons, he becomes a hopeless romantic. In
”Walden,” he describes a loon`s call:
The loon uttered a long-drawn unearthly howl, probably more like that of a wolf than any bird, as when a beast puts his muzzle to the ground and deliberately howls. This was his looning, perhaps the wildest sound that is ever heard here, making the woods ring far and wide.
In writing his authoritative ”Birds of the World,” Oliver L. Austin was all business, except for two pages devoted to loons. There he found space for a personal tribute to loon music:
It embodies the very spirit of far places, of forest-clad lakes where the clear air is scented with balsam and fir . . . no one who has ever heard the diver`s music, the mournful far-carrying call notes and the uninhibited, cacophonous, crazy laughter, can ever forget it.
Most reference books relate the common loon to the English word ”lumme” or the Scandinavian word ”lom,” both meaning awkward or lame. Because the loon is very clumsy on land, these references do make sense. The ”Oxford Book of British Bird Names,” published in 1984, suggests the word ”loon” was a 17th Century corruption of the Old Norse word ”lomr, which referred to the red-throated loon. The basic meaning of the Norse word is moaning, an allusion to the loud wailing calls of the loon. In the 17th Century loon meant ”a fool.” Shakespeare`s Macbeth called a servant ”a cream-faced loon,” which one Shakespearean scholar translated as ”a stupid fellow.”
In his definition of loon for the ”Century Dictionary” (1899), William Whitney added an editorial note: ”The wild actions of the loon in escaping danger and its dismal cry suggest the idea of insanity; hence the common American simile `as crazy as a loon.` ” Times certainly have changed: Few today would term loon music ”dismal.”
It is difficult to believe that the loon`s incredible range of sounds come from a simple organ, the syrinx, in the lower part of the windpipe. So much music, so much meaning. Is it all territorial instinct or could loons be calling, partly at least, to express joy?
According to Framingham (Mass.) State College biologist William Braklow, who has studied the loon`s calls for years, the tremolo is the loon`s all-purpose call, which can signal alarm, annoyance, worry or greeting. Apparently loons can send very different messages by increasing the duration and frequency of the tremolo. Usually the tremolo is coupled with behavioral responses such as a dive, a run on the surface or a take-off. The presence of people often elicits the tremolo, especially when boaters or fishermen approach too closely. Reacting to the common loon`s tremolo call, writer John McPhee reflected, ”If he were human, it would be the laugh of the deeply insane.”
Often termed the night call, the wail is probably the favorite call of contemporary loon watchers. Oliver Austin called the wail ” . . . one of the loveliest sounds in nature.” The wail conveys a general message. Often the wail is used to reestablish contact with a mate; it is the call of choice when a loon on the nest wants to exchange places with its mate.
The yodel is the only loon call claimed by a single sex; it`s given only by the male. Sigurd Olson describes it as ”the weirdest and wildest of calls . . . beautiful and thrilling . . . maniacal and blood-curdling.” The message of the yodel has been fairly well defined–it is the loon`s territorial imperative. Barklow calls it the ”attack” message that conveys an aggressive meaning to nearby birds. Imagine two boys shouting across their parents`
property lines and you`ve got the picture. Because it can be used to identify individual loons, the yodel has opened new horizons in contemporary loon research. The audio-spectographs of a given loon`s yodel calls give one-of-a- kind voice prints. Whether loons can recognize other loons as individuals is uncertain.
Frequently used but not often reported because it is a quiet, intimate call, the hoot is used mainly between family members and may serve an ”I`m okay/are you okay?” function.
The full loon repertoire can best be appreciated during night chorusing. Early in the summer season, mid-May to mid-June in most regions, loons talk a good part of the night, using mainly the tremolo but also the wail and the yodel. Of the many moments of loon magic, these are special. On the first night of a trip in May of 1970, I camped with three friends at Saganaga Lake right on the Minnesota-Canadian border. The calling began at sunset and lasted well into the night, and it will stay with me a lifetime. On an island in the middle of this sprawling border lake, we were surrounded and we surrendered.
While loon language does rest upon these four basic parts of loon speech, it also embraces a few extra pieces of vocabulary. Often calls are acciden-
tally or deliberately (who knows?) combined to create additions to the loon lexicon. Fusions of the tremolo-wail and tremolo-yodel are frequently heard, delighting listeners and confounding researchers. Are these confused or clever loons? If the tremolo call implies a tendency to flee and the wail a need to establish contact, as several researchers suggest, then does the tremolo-wail reflect a deranged or even schizophrenic loon mind? Probably not. People change their minds; why not loons?
In appearance, voice, behavior and physiology, the common loon is a fascinating bird. It is distinctive, from its daggerlike beak right down to its feet–they are enormous. . . While loon`s feet are fully webbed with three toes, they are not what scientists call perfect swimming feet. . . Not perfect maybe, but the loon`s feet do the job well. In the 1917 edition of
”Birds of America,” contributing editor Edward Howe Forbush compared the dive of the loon to a bolt shot from a crossbow and described their quickness as ”truly astonishing.”
Part of the loon`s quickness is due to basic anatomy. The bird`s torpedo shape, with leg muscles blending into a streamlined body mass, helps to give the loon amazing aquatic freedom. On a quiet, glassy lake surface, loons swim effortlessly, as if friction were not a physical property.
While definitive answers await additional banding research, most scientists believe the common loon is ”long-lived.” Biologists estimate the life-span of the common loon at 15 to 30 years. The common loon is a large bird. In most bird books the weight range is listed as 7 to 9 pounds. Because their bodies are compact and dense, loons are deceptively heavy.
Even with a large wingspan of up to 58 inches, common loons still have a body weight disproportionate to their wing area. While loons sometimes need up to a quarter mile of aquatic runway, they can be more efficient. Getting off the water, however, does not get a loon safely away from the lake. The ascent of a loon`s flight is quite gradual, often forcing the bird to circle a lake to get over the treetops. The speed of loons in flight is surprisingly fast. While most bird books still list the common loon`s flight speed at 60 m.p.h., contemporary researchers place the speed substantially higher. New York biologist Paul Kurlinger has estimated ground speeds (taking into account following winds) of 93 m.p.h. during spring migration and 108 m.p.h. during fall migration. The average air speed (not counting the help of the wind) was 75 m.p.h.
A look at the common loon is not complete without reference to the bird`s dramatic red eye, a feature shared by the other three species of loon. (Along with the common loon, the lower 48 states` only resident, other species are the red-throated loon, the yellow-billed loon and the arctic loon). Without the ruby eye, fewer artists would be inspired to capture the loon on canvas. Always a source of romantic mystery, the loon`s bright-red eye raises the obvious question–why red? Because a loon`s eyes reflects red back to us, it looks red. By reflecting red light, a loon`s eye eliminates red light before it enters the eye; in effect, it does the same thing as water–it eliminates red. If a loon`s eye were blue, it would filter out the only light available for deep-water fishing. Deeper than 15 feet or so, there is no red anyway, so why not have an eye that filters out red?
Loons are homebodies. It`s one of the things people like best about loons: They can count on seeing their loon in their bay. While loons summer in a restricted territory of perhaps a hundred acres or less, they have for about six weeks in late spring an even sharper focus–the nest site. Except for occasional fishing trips by the nonincubating member of the pair, life during nesting season revolves around a very small piece of ground and water. It`s not difficult to find loon nests if one starts looking on islands. Loon islands are usually small and have low-lying vegetation, and generally loons select the side of the island protected from the prevailing winds. Because nests are just small heaps of readily available vegetation, a common loon would never win a prize for either design or construction technique.
Within a couple of days from the start of nesting, the female will lay her first egg. Typically, there is a one-day delay before a second egg is laid. The egg or eggs must be incubated for about a month. Like nest building, incubation is shared by the pair, a behavior common in birds. Incubation doesn`t appear to be stressful work. All loons need to do is turn their eggs occasionally. With awkward-looking but surprisingly efficient movement, loons turn the eggs at irregular intervals using partly open mandibles.
The hatching of loon chicks is a cause for great joy–at least among humans. In New Hampshire a tradition of celebrating hatchings with birth announcements has caught on, all apparently part of a ”loon religion.”
Although it varies greatly by region, hatching dates typically occur during the last half of June. For loon chicks, nest is home for only a very short time. After a half day of drying, chicks are capable of swimming. The first chick hatched will be beckoned to the water with a soft call. After the second chick is hatched and dried, that chick, too, is lured to the water. Then the nest is abandoned.
Watching loon chicks in the wild is a pure delight. Their early attempts at diving are quite comical. I recall watching 3-day-old chicks with their parents on Day Lake in northern Wisconsin. It was like watching diving Ping-Pong balls. The chicks tried to dive but their buoyancy made them pop right back to the surface. The deepest dive by 2-day-old chicks is about a foot, but within a few days chicks can dive to depths of 10 feet.
Because chicks are quite vulnerable to exposure and fatigue, chilling is a more serious problem than predation. This may be an important reason for the lengthy free rides adults give their chicks. Back-riding is a priceless sight seen only in the first few weeks of a chick`s life. The care and feeding of loon chicks is a full-time vocation for the adults. A turning point in the relationship between adults and juveniles is the development of flight feathers, which occurs at about 11 weeks. At this age, some immature loons leave their natal lake.
An accurate image of the common loon`s status in North America would not be a snapshot of the current geographic breeding range but rather a motion picture capturing the northward progression of the loon`s ”permanent” range. It would not be an entirely pleasant film, especially the frames from the early 20th Century, when the retreat northward was shockingly rapid.
Lakeshore development has had probably the most devastating consequences. Except in northern Maine and in the large federal tracts in northern Minnesota, lakes without a necklace of summer homes are hard to find these days. The post-World War II economic boom, coupled with a new interest in the outdoors, fueled an all-out assault on our northern lakes.
It`s a tough world for loons. They have battled diseases, competition from other species, high and low water levels, predation and other natural threats for millions of years–and survived them all. During the past few decades, however, Homo sapiens hasn`t made the loon`s lot any easier. While the sport shooting of loons is thankfully a sad memory, a list of new and more insidious problems is facing the bird: toxic chemicals, acid raid, destruction of nesting habitats, nest flooding, increased predation caused by the exploding populations of some predators, commercial fishing operations that net loons in addition to fish and harassment by human beings. None of these problems faced loons when Native Americans developed their versions of loon religion. Some are serious enough to threaten the very existence of the species; others are just nagging problems in restricted geographic locales. But all must be dealt with if the cry of the loon is to be heard in the 21st Century and beyond.
All loons ask for is a place to live, clean water, some fish to eat and a little privacy. For what loons give to people, that seems a small price to pay.
