Hi, I’m Jessica Laman, and this is Mount Desert Island in Maine,
home of Acadia National Park and other wildlife sanctuaries.
My dad, Tim Laman, is a wildlife photographer
and this year, the pandemic reigned in his world travel.
He decided that filming Common loons would be a great project that we could do close to home
using our family as a filming team. My brother, Russell is helping film with a second camera
while I help carry gear, record audio, and take notes on behavior.
It's mid-July and that's hatchling season for loons on Mount Desert Island.
We're here to get a unique look at the early life of these amazing creatures.
It ended up being a great experience. I learned so much about loons whose unmistakable wail
is forever associated with the lakes of the northeast...and a sound that I'll never forget.
Biologists from the Somes-Meynell Wildlife Sanctuary monitor all the loon nests on the
island. So, when we got here they were able to show us a nest that had not yet hatched.
These loon parents have spent the last month taking turns incubating the egg.
Loons lay just one or two eggs per year and this pair only has one. We watched the
nest for two days before the egg hatched, during which there wasn't a lot of action.
A couple of times I did see the male assume a defensive posture.
When some intruding loons came near, he began yodeling;
a male loon call used to assert their territory.
Finally our waiting paid off.
This chick hatched during the night or early in the morning and now it's leaving
the nest for the first time. From now on it's a water bird and will rarely go on land again
until it's time to start a nest of its own when it's fully mature. I find that pretty amazing!
Although they can swim well on their first day,
chicks are totally dependent on their parents for food.
This little one clearly knows that it's supposed to beg for food;
it keeps pecking at their beaks,
but it takes them a little while to start feeding it.
Finally one parent catches a tiny fish and we see the chick get its first meal.
A few valleys over we observed a second loon family at the south end of Echo Lake.
These parents hatched two young chicks. On the first day we arrived here,
they were only three days old so it was really cool to watch them grow over the past two weeks.
When they're really little, the chicks spend most of their time
riding on the backs of their parents. Nestled between their wings they have a chance to
rest and may also be safe from predators like snapping turtles in the shallows.
As they get older, they begin to run out of space on their parents backs
and spend more time in the water. The chicks dive more and more staying down for longer, but
in the two weeks we've been watching them their parents are still feeding them all their food.
Parents are constantly hunting, usually in the shallows. They'll swim low with their
heads underwater, snorkeling, looking for prey to catch. And sometimes the
adult with the chick on its back dives under suddenly, leaving it bobbing on the surface.
They're constantly bringing up fish, crustaceans, and insect larvae.
The chicks quickly get good at accepting food, but there are still some funny fails.
The chicks will try and take the fish and miss, or it flops out of their beaks
and the parents would dart and catch it and try again.
The parents come up with food so often, that sometimes the chicks look too full to eat another
bite. And sometimes the adults were a little over ambitious with what the chicks would be
able to eat and come up with this massive fish and try to get the chicks to eat it. They can be
really persistent, spending up to 20 minutes offering the same food over and over again.
But when they wanted to, the chicks were surprisingly good at taking down big fish.
As they grow older, we start to see them exhibit behaviors that we see fully formed in the adults.
We often see the adults rise up, stretching and flapping their powerful wings.
Meanwhile, the chicks can't even fly yet so it's really cute
seeing them try the same thing flapping up with their wimpy little wings!
I've really enjoyed this time here in Maine;
working as a family to tell the story of the loons. But how are they doing?
Overall, they're fortunately not in danger and have benefited greatly from conservation efforts.
Loons need clear, unpolluted lakes to raise their young and can be
harmed by contaminants and disturbances, and that's something that's under our control.
Lead fishing sinkers can poison loons, so efforts to replace them with alternatives are important.
And their nests are vulnerable so people need to be careful along the shores of lakes, especially
early in the breeding season, because if a nest is disturbed the parents may abandon their eggs.
When you spend so much time carefully observing animal behavior, it forges a
lasting connection. That's why national parks and local nature reserves are so important.
They give everyone the opportunity to enjoy nature
and become invested in the wildlife that lives there.
The chicks we've seen will spend at least 10 to 12 weeks with their parents and this year nine of the
13 chicks that hatched here on Mount Desert Island survived to fly off to their wintering grounds.
Maybe some will return here to breed someday in the future.