Will There Be Surprise Babies?
We are approaching the finish line of this years’ loon breeding season, and many of us are already looking forward to next year! This year has been terrible from a productivity standpoint! There has been far more parents abandoning both eggs and, in a few cases, just their second egg. We’ve been able to assign human interference to at least two of these abandoned nests but not all of them.
We are giving pair fidelity a closer look as a contributing factor. For example, we had the same banded pair successfully reproducing in Long Pond’s Beaver Cove for four years straight. Two years ago, the banded female got kicked out by an intruding female as what happened again this season. As a result, a historically great producing territory has gone dry for two years in a row. Not a good sign.
We are also considering this possibility: Do we have too many loons for the size and shape of our ponds? It seems that every nesting territory has fallen victim to intruding loons looking to take over a cove for their own. A question worth pondering is what happens to that chick born on Great Pond’s Marina territory in 2021 that’s now trying to come “home” after spending their juvenile three to four years on the ocean? They want to come back to their prenatal cove only to be seen now as an intruding threat! Some intruders feeling their oats and coming into a breeding territory in an attempt to take over are now predators, along with eagles, turtles, and raccoons, just to name a few. A typical week in the life of our loons! UGH!!
But despite the aforementioned, we do have four chicks on Great Pond but just one on all of Long Pond. We still have two nests in the works with a potential of four more chicks on Great Pond, if Mother Nature can only cooperate for a change. Pending a surprise or two, Long Pond is done for the season. Although it is a little late for loons to renest or to nest for that matter, there are usually one or two surprises every season in the form of new nests that we were not aware of. Let’s keep our fingers crossed. The young eyes of our two Colby interns did turn up a surprise nest yesterday on Lower Long Pond but it remains to be seen if our pair actually lay the egg (or two)! Good going, Jodie and Barlow! Thank you from all of us!
With the breeding period essentially over, you will be seeing larger groups of rafting loons as the adults become more social. Our observers have been seeing this already on Great Pond with a couple of rafts of five and seven but we are not seeing it on Long Pond to date.
If you have a particular questions regarding our Belgrade loon population, please email your inquiry to info@blamaine.org, and we will try to answer your question either in this column or via email. Have a great summer enjoying the “call of the loon!” We are so fortunate to summer here in the Belgrades!
Dick Greenan is chairman of the Belgrade Lakes Association’s Loon Preservation Project.
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