 Welcome to Portland Sustainability Series. I'm Meg Gray of the Science and Technology Library and you're at the Columbia Library and I'm one half of the planning committee. We have Jessica Burton. She's the executive director for the Southern Man Conservation Collaborative. She'll speak about that a bit. We meet here every fourth Wednesday of the month at 5.30ish depending on our speakers availability and present a different sustainability topic here in Maine. And next month we're going to have Chris Sauer. He's the CEO of Maine Renewable, oh goodness, I don't know if I got any notes for this. He's going to be talking about Maine Energy and Maine Energy, so that's going to be really interesting. And I'm going to hand over to Jess. Hi, as Meg said, I'm Jess Burton with the Southern Maine Conservation Collaborative. We are a group of 19 conservation organizations focused on land and water who come together to have a bigger impact working on things together. Maine Audubon is one of our most active partners and so I'm really pleased that as students here tonight I have to tell us about balloons and what they told us. I live off the east side of it and so I have the great fortune to hear the news often in the winter coming on the ferry and what excites me among many other things about this park is that in 1995, I believe I was working for Patagonia in Freeport and they organized to be part of the Lund Count and we went out to run the leaks. So it's really exciting. No, it's counting. It's being aware of what's in our environment and just that little step really takes us to the next place of what we can do and how we can have a bigger impact on this environment. So thank you very much for coming and without further ado, here's Susie Gallup. Thank you so much for braving the rain. It was pretty miserable out there to come here. So thanks so much and I do a lot of Loon Talks every summer and my first one is always, this is my first one of the 2018. So I hope I spifted up this morning all day actually, added a bunch of new slides. I hope it's not too long for everybody but I'll run through, as I do the talk, I'm happy to take questions. It's a little hard to see but just holler if you have questions. And as we go along, I work for Maine Audubon. We are based in Falmouth and we have about, the number goes up and down, but about 15,000 members and friends and people who help us with different things. We work on environmental education, conservation and advocacy. They're the three legs of our stool that is wildlife habitat conservation in Maine. There's a bunch of information on the back table. Take a look and there's some habitats which is our monthly, quarterly publication. Help yourself to any of the materials that are back there and then if you have any questions about Maine Audubon, I can also answer those after. But you're all here to hear about Loon. So, this talk, the first half is kind of natural history. Where are Loon's? What do they do and what do we know about them and where they go and what they eat and all that kind of interesting stuff that people like to know about. And then the second half is threats, things we're worried about and it ends with kind of what you can do and what can all of us do to improve Loon conservation in Maine. So, without further ado. So, this is a, just to emphasize one of the really interesting things about Loon is their size. They have about a 46 inch wing span and then they're about 32 inches from the tip of the bill to the end of the tail. They're end of the tail, so they're big birds. And in Maine, Maine actually has bigger Loon's than New Hampshire and which is bigger Loon's than Vermont which has bigger Loon's than out west. So, it's really interesting. We have some of the biggest Loon's in the US and then Loon's east of us in Nova Scotia get even bigger. So, but our birds tend to be a healthy male in Maine in breeding condition can weigh about 15 pounds. They have, and one of the reasons they're so heavy is they have solid bones instead of hollow bones which makes them very good swimmers but makes them, makes it tough to take flight. And I'll talk about flight in one second. But here's a, just to look at a view that you don't usually see of a Loon, a skeleton. There's a couple interesting things with the skeleton that I like to point out. One is the size of the feet, really, really large. The feet, that's how they get all their power under water when they're swimming. They don't really use their wings at all. They keep their wings pretty much tight in like that. Another thing from this slide is the neck. They have this really long neck and their vertebrae are actually designed so that they are really flexible. They can move that neck right, left, up, down. Any way a fish goes, a Loon can swivel its neck to get that fish. So that's one of the reasons that there are really efficient, efficient at catching fish is because they have this incredible flexible neck. And then the last thing is just at the end of that neck is their bill, which is heavy and sharp and really strong. And I'll have an interesting slide and a little bit to show you about how strong that bill is. This is just a shot underwater with a GoPro camera to show you, again, just where those feet are. Remember where the feet are because that will come back into play with some other life history things we're gonna talk about. Big feet in the back and this is a juvenile that was raised in, not really in captivity, but in a pen. I'm not sure if anybody's heard about this project. Biodiversity Research Institute had a big grant and they took some chicks from Maine and New York, brought them to Massachusetts and raised them in pens. They never saw any people, but this is one of their birds. And the goal with that is to try to get more birds, get to get the range to expand south. So we'll talk about that some more, too. So one of the things, if you're a big, heavy bird on the water, I mentioned you have a little bit of a hard time taking flight. So one of the things, has people seen loons take off? I don't know what they do, right? So they make this long run over open water. So they need at least, well, at least a quarter of a mile of open water to take off. Then they just, and that's just to get enough speed because of their weight, they're so heavy, they have to get that speed up in order to get airborne. But once they get going, even though they're so heavy, but once they get going, they can actually fly. Does anyone have a guess on how fast a loon, once they get cruising speed overhead, how fast they might fly? Any guesses? I can look out. That's really fast. Oh, way more than that. Way more than that. Oh, even more. They've been clocked at 90 miles an hour overhead. So once they get cruising, they can go really fast. So, and then I gave this loon talk once and there was somebody in the audience who was in the Air Force and he came up after and explained to me how, that it's all physics, it's heavy. When you're heavy in the air, you have to keep going fast because if you don't, you start to lose altitude. So he explained to me about how it works with cargo jets and all kinds of things. But all I came away from that is that if you're really heavy, you have to go fast. Or else you start losing altitude. So they go fast and where do they go? Well, this is a range map. So the, I'm not sure if you can see the legend, but the light blue along the coasts, both coasts is where loons are in the winter time. And then the yellow, you can see every state in the union. Yeah, I think every state has loons at some point as they migrate through and then they're gonna settle up in that orange area across the northern part of the continent. That's where they're gonna be breeding. So interestingly, main loons, and someday I need to put some arrows on this graph to show migration routes, but the migration routes, definitely they go sort of inland and like those birds down in the Gulf Coast are going up to the center of the continent. The birds down in Florida, mid-Atlantic are going kind of to the Midwest. And then interestingly, our main birds, as far as we can tell, our main birds stay pretty much off the coast of Maine all winter. The furthest south we've ever found a Maine loon has been right in Maryland, mid-Atlantic. There's a few that hang out in Long Island Sound, but as far as we can tell, most of our main birds stay right in Maine, right off of Maine water. So it doesn't really make sense when you stormy winter day and you look out there and you wonder why aren't they down in the Gulf Coast? But that could tie back to why they're so, why our loons are so big is that they don't have, their migration distance is so short that they can kind of afford to get bigger because they don't have to fly very far. But you can imagine if you're flying 90 miles an hour and you're wintering in Casco Bay and you have to go to Sabago Lake for the summertime, you can imagine that's a pretty short commute. So we think, does anybody live on a lake or have a camp on a lake and know when loons, there's a unique day where they show up every spring? What's that? Yeah, some lakes, not all lakes. There's some lakes I would just pass on the other bed, but no one's because of ice. Right, so ice out. They need to, obviously they need the ice to be gone and what's really intriguing is that they show up on, they show up on lakes the day of or the day after ice out pretty much on the clock based on our information we've collected from our loon count volunteers who I'll talk about later in the presentation. But yeah, they show up right away. And so we think that they, based on satellite telemetry that we've looked at, we think that they make kind of looping flights north. Now, main birds are different. A main bird coming to the Vagal Lake just flies in and checks it out and flies back. If you're flying up through the center of the country, if you're a loon flying up the center of the country, you're going as far as the ice is, as far as the open water is, when you get to ice, you turn back and you find a place to rest. You wait a couple of days and then you fly north and you follow. And so they're basically following the ice out as it moves, marches north. And so in Maine, around here, we certainly have a lot of loons, but we definitely, I'm not sure a way to test this other than tag a lot of loons. But if you look overhead, there's definitely a bunch of loons going overhead, checking out lakes and going back to the ocean, probably every day, while they're waiting for that water to melt. And there's really a good reason that they want to get here when they get here. The males come first, so they're the first ones to migrate and they show up on their lake on the day of ice out. They typically go back to the same territory, about 75% of the time you're gonna get the same loon on the same territory that was there the year before. And that's why they want to get here early. The males are really territorial. They're gonna set up their territory the same place they did the year before, chances are. And but if you're a new loon and you don't have a territory, you might try to get one, steal one from somebody who's there. So it's basically a mad scramble for real estate is what it is, the first day of ice out. So you see a lot of, you might hear a lot of commotion. There's a lot of territorial interactions. You might see something like this where loons are actually fighting. So this is probably two males. And you can see, if you can see up really look in the middle of there that loon on the left has a big chunk of muscle in its bill. So they are pretty tough fighters and they will fight. We do know that loons have killed other loons. In fact, the next slide shows down here that's a loon sternum. So that's loons, like we, that's where they're, you can see their ribs right here. That's where the ribs connect. So our breastbone is really small. We don't have to fly. So we don't have a lot of muscle here, but birds have this really big keel and sternum right here so that they can develop these really big flight muscles. And so all those holes that you see in that sternum are punctured ones from another loon. So incredibly high percentage of sternums that we've looked at from dead loons have these old puncture wounds. So it's really not uncommon for loons to fight so much that they actually puncture that sternum. They don't die from it necessarily. And we have a collection of sternums where you can see the holes that were healed over the calcium grew in and the bone grew in. So they don't die from them, but they can if they get a really good strike in. So we know it's a big issue with these territorial loons in the spring, but they really want those territories. When they get on their territory, one of the things they do is call. So there's four calls and I used to space them out in this presentation and now I just play them all at the beginning or not at the beginning, but I play them all together. So I'm gonna play you the yodel. Does that sound familiar to people? Maybe you heard that one before. So that's one way to tell males from females is that only the males make the yodel. Another way to tell males from females is I mentioned that a full, a male in full breeding condition in Maine is about 15 pounds. Males are typically a little bit bigger than females. So if you see a pair on a lake and one looks a little bigger, that one's gonna be the male. The other way you can tell is if one yodels, you'll know that's the male. Other than that, they're identical and even vets who have live birds in their hands can't really tell them apart. Often can't tell them apart. So it's good to remember that when you hear a yodel. They'll do make a lot of yodel when they're setting up their territories, but you also hear the make yodels when they're threatened or stressed. So when, you know, if a boat comes too close or a sea plane is overhead or, you know, a predator is nearby, you might hear a yodel. The second call is a tremolo. This is kind of the, I think this is the most sort of, well, so, here I'll play one more time. That's a short one. So tremolos you hear from birds, both females and males, and they, again, they make it when they're threatened or stressed or they sense danger, but they also do it as part of a pair bond. So when the females show up on the territories, usually about two weeks, one to two weeks after the males have come and established the territories, the females return. Now the females also go back to the same, they tend to go back to the same territory. So people are really disappointed to learn that loons don't meet for life, but they don't. They bond over their territory and then they separate for the winter and then they bond again over their territory. So a lot of times tremolo is part of a pair bonding behavior that you'll see where they swim around in circles, they dip their bills in the water and they tremolo together back and forth. Let's see. Then the third call is a whale. So this is the one that everybody likes to hear at night. So whales are really contact calls, so they're just calls that are made between, there's no threat, there's no stress, it's just a communication among families and that's why you'll hear a whale from one lake be answered from loons on a far away lake making a whale as well. So that is a nice sound to hear because you know nobody's in trouble, they're just communicating. And then the last call, which I think it hardly qualifies as a call, but technically it's a call is the hoot. So it's another nice call, another nice in terms of it's not a threat or stress, it's just communication generally within the family. So parents to chicks or mates to each other. So those are the calls. The male and the female get together, they do some pair bonding and then the next thing they're gonna do is set up their nest. So loon nests are not very elaborate, they tend to be just mounds of vegetation, mud, anything they can pull together. They're right, the key feature for loon nests is that they're located right on the shoreline and there's a really good reason for that. If you think back to the skeleton and the slide of the loon underwater with his legs way in the back of the body and then think about how heavy they are, loons are terrible on land in terms of their ability to walk and get around. Has anyone seen one on land? Sometimes you can see them if their nests get stranded, you can watch them get up to their nest. They're very awkward, slow, lumbering and basically they're just a, when they do that, when they're walking on land they're just a big, it's like a big flashing signal to predators that something's going on and so they wanna be right on the water, they wanna slip on and off the water without being detected and that's why you get these nests here right near the water. So there's a couple different, I have a lot of loon nest pictures and I just put in a few just to show you, they can be different, they can be floating mats of vegetation, they can be on islands, they can be really soggy sometimes, you know, loon eggs don't have to stay dry, they can get actually pretty wet throughout the season especially if there's a rainstorm. The water levels might rise as long as the egg stays near its parent, that's okay, the parents can keep it warm. You can see the egg itself is you can almost, well you can sort of see it as right. Well, actually I don't know if that is an egg. No, I don't know, I'll show you an egg in just a second. Oh, the next slide has an egg. There you can see the egg. It's totally camouflage, brown or olive with speckles, so it's hidden from camouflage from predators. This loon also has a leg man, if you see the red, barely see it on its right leg, there's a red band. We have cooperated with Biodiversity Research Institute, they've done a lot of banding, not only just in Maine, but across the US and Canada, they ban loons and then, so they have a whole database of loons with different color leg bands on different, they're two different legs, so if you do ever see a loon with color bracelets on its legs, you can actually call them up and they'll tell you where, how old it is, where it was banded and now they're pretty hard to see, but every once in a while you can get a glimpse if you see a loon get on a nest like this. But they... Anyway, so they have these, they build these nests right on the lake shore, we think that loons are, we think that loons learn a lot about nesting as when they become new parents, so we think that loons, when they first start nesting, probably aren't that successful, they do things like they build, they'll mound vegetation up, but they won't put an indentation in the top to hold an egg and they'll lay the egg and you know what happens, it rolls out into the water, or they don't know what predators are and so they leave the nest unattended too long and a predator comes and gets the egg. We think that the older, the more a loon, that a loon has to basically try it a few times before they get skilled enough to raise chicks. So they, there's something else I wanted to say about that, I should say, I think I should mention at this point too that one of the interesting facts I mentioned, they don't mate for life. The other interesting thing that most people are surprised to learn is that loons actually don't breed until they're seven years old. So they look like adults when they're three, they have juvenile pollutants, when they're the first year, and then actually it's two, when they come back their second summer, they'll look like adults, they're black and white and they have this dramatic spots on their back and people just assumed, oh, they breed when they come back, but because of these banding studies that BRI did, they learn that by watching them year after year after year, the average age of first nesting was seven and that some birds weren't nesting for the first time until they were 11. So one of the conservation messages for loons is that these birds are, they take a long time to breed for the first time. It takes even longer to become a good breeder, an experienced parent who knows what to do to take care of their young, their eggs and their young. And so, and the birds live, the oldest loon that we know of is 30 years old and he was breeding last summer in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. So they're long-lived and they only have, they lay these two eggs every summer, every, if they have a territory, they'll lay two eggs. On average, only one half of those eggs will survive to adulthood, which really means every other year, so over two years laying four eggs, we expect one chick to make it to adulthood. So it's a species that we're particularly, I don't know how to say it, we are, it's not like a rabbit or not to be little rabbits, but it's not like a bird, it's not like an animal that produces a lot, lives, has a short life and makes a lot of, like a trustee turtle that produces lots of young and it really invests, I guess I'm trying to say that each adult that we have is a big investment and each chick we have is a big investment of time and expertise and so think of that when I'm talking about the threats section coming up. So here's another good view of the egg, they males and the females take turns incubating, they turn the egg every time they sit down. Eggs are actually in Maine in the summertime, which is hard to believe given the weather we've had, but in the summer it does get warm here and the sun does shine and one of the biggest problems with loons and eggs is actually overheating. So the parents for a lot of the time in the summertime, the parents are actually keeping the eggs cool and an abandoned nest, if a loon is chased off a nest in the summertime, it's actually at a greater risk of getting, you know, cooked, literally cooked, overheated versus a loon on a rainy day getting chased off of a nest or being disturbed on a nest. Egg on a cold day is actually more likely to survive than an egg left on its own on a hot day. So it's a good thing to remember when you're, if you're out and about on a hot day and you're disturbing loons, which none of you would ever do, but it's something to remember. Let's see, so eggs are laid between, let eggs are laid between May 15th and June 15th and then they hatch, they take about 29 days to hatch and they hatch, so they hatch between June 15th, typically June 15th to July 15th, is our typical hatch time in Maine. So this is a position that has been documented for a long, for many years, but it's called a hangover position and it's one of the positions, I just keep it in the slideshow to remind people that this is a stressful, this loon's under a lot of stress, so this is somebody who's gotten too close to take this picture and this loon is hunkered down, they're ready to slide off the nest. They're in sort of panic mode. So it's just one thing that I add, keep in the slideshow to remind people, if you do ever see a loon like this, it's you're too close and a good thing to do would be to back away. So loons, like I mentioned, two eggs typically every in the nest, they hatch and you get two, if everything goes well, you get two chicks. Loon siblings are not very kind to each other. They are probably fighting right here. One has been, because they are laid a day apart, but they hatch on the same day, one chick is just a little bit bigger than his or her younger sibling. So one chick has the advantage and they don't mess around. The bigger chick wants more food, wants to be fed more often. And so there's typically a lot of fighting in the nest. They leave the nest right away, but there's definitely a lot of sibling rivalry in loons. So they start, as soon as they hatch, they dry off, they get in the water, they never go back to that nest site. They move to a nursery area. I should mention that loon territories are typically about 100 acres of water. So, and within that 100 acres of water, they need a nest site where they can put their nest close to shore and then they need a nursery area, which is, there's typically a more quiet, a cove, something away from the wind, waves where they spend the most time with their chicks. So they are mobile right away and the first thing they need to do is be fed. So loons are really good swimmers, powerful swimmers, and they eat a lot of fish. But they're amazing swimmers, really good at catching fish. They typically eat fish that are only, well, wait, I'll wait till that. First I'll tell you, sometimes they eat really big fish. We actually know that they, we found carcasses on loon skeletons on shorelines where they died with a big fish in their bills. So they definitely can overdo it. But typically, sorry, this is a little bit graphic, but this is the contents of a loon gizzard. So I'll just quickly tell you that we collect, one of the things we've done over the last 25 years is collect a lot of dead loons. And the reason we do that is we get them to Tufts. Tufts has a wildlife clinic down in North Grafton, Mass. And they have a whole core of students and they do necropsies. And I have some slides later on in the presentation. But so this is a slide from a, this is the contents from a dead loons gizzard, which is what they have instead of a stomach, what birds have instead of a stomach. And so you can see the rulers at the top, a six inch ruler. So typically loons eat fish in the six inch range, six to eight inch range. So they don't go for the really big ones. But when they're fishing for their chicks, they do catch really small fish. So they have to catch small fish for small chicks. And as they grow, they get bigger and they catch bigger and bigger fish for their chicks. The chicks can fish for themselves, but they mostly get insects, things that are on top of the water. They do start diving right away, but a chick, loon chick only weighs about only a few ounces. So they can't, they just don't, they're too buoyant. They can't really dive much at all at the beginning, which is good because there's a lot of predators around waiting to snatch them up. So they stay pretty safe. They spend a lot of time on their parents back. And so I have a little chronology of eight of chick, eight aging chicks here just to show you how they grow and how quickly they grow. So at one week, less than one week, they're gonna spend a lot of time on their parents back. And they have a couple of reasons for that. One is to stay warm out of the water. One is to stay away from predators, which we'll talk about later in the presentation. And then the third one is just to stay physically with their parent. One of the issues that loons have, loons face is just getting separated from their chicks. If a boat, you know, if a boat separates a parent and a chick, they can potentially not find each other again. So this back riding keeps them together. And I should mention, if anyone has questions, ask me as we go. I'm happy to take questions as we go. So just to go through this chronology that was less than one week, here they are at one week. You could already tell they're getting a little bit longer. Their body elongates. They still have the egg tooth on their bill that they use to get out of their egg by two to three weeks. Now you can see the shape is really adult-like in terms of they're just growing longer and longer and longer, but they're still downy, covered with down feathers. By four weeks is when they start molting into, they start getting, you can just barely see it on the breast there, they're getting some adult smoother white feathers on their chest. By six weeks, they're getting pretty, you know, kind of, this is kind of an adolescent loon, teenager, a teenage age-ish loon. So they're coming into it and they're gonna be beautiful, but not quite yet. So they've got this mix of down and these smooth flight feathers. They're not flying yet, but they're getting these contour feathers all over their bodies. Seven weeks, you can see that just a few little bits of down at the end towards their tail and a little bit on their head. You can see this one, this one's harassing its parent, clearly a teenager. And then by nine weeks, they are pretty close to being able to fend for themselves. They can fish, they can dive, they are, they're flying independently by about 10 weeks. So they can, we consider them fledged if they can make it this and make it to nine weeks. What else was I gonna say about that? Oh, I know, I'm gonna say so, even though they can do it by themselves in terms of taking care of themselves, like many young adults, they still want some help from their parents. So young juvenile loons, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14 weeks old, if their parents are still around, they will beg for food, they'll hang close to their parents. They want as much parental care as they can get because it's a pretty hard world out there on your own. So they try to get as much attention as they can from their parent. But what happens is parents will hang around and take care of them, but what happens is once the fall weather comes, once the days start to get shorter, adult loons start to flock together in these rafts. And we can have rafts of 20 or 30 or 40 adults together, especially on some of our bigger freshwater lakes. So even if they have teenagers, even if they have small chicks, if a loon nests fails in June or July, loons will, they won't re-nest if they've had, if their chicks, if their eggs are hatched, but if they lose their eggs, they'll nest again. And we do have loons nesting in Maine into August, even into like the middle of August, we have chicks hatching. Those chicks can technically make it, but in all likelihood it's really challenging because their parents are gonna take off when the days start to get shorter. They can't help it, it's hormonal, it's biological, they take off and they leave their chicks alone. So ideally those, they're teenagers and they can make it, but we do have cases of young chicks, younger chicks being left alone to fend for themselves. And like I said, they can make it, it just all depends. But in the fall, the adults get together, they start to molt, so you can see them molt, they molt from their face backwards, it goes back over their head, and they basically look indistinguishable in my opinion from an adult loon, I mean from a juvenile loon. So a chick hatch this year and an adult in the fall will look pretty much the same come late September, October. So that's kind of, and then the birds leave separately, the adults raft up together earlier, I mentioned when the days start getting shorter, so September, October, the adults are rafting together and then they'll fly out to the ocean together, and then the juveniles, if you see loons late in the winter, like into October, November, even December, they're probably juveniles and they do the same thing, the juveniles all get together, and then they go out to the ocean together. The adults get there much faster, we know that adults make direct flights to the ocean, juveniles wander around, they check out different lakes, but eventually they make it to the ocean, and that's, if you think back to that initial slide, one of the early slides with the range map, they're all back out on the ocean for the winter. So that's kind of the year in the life of a loon, I'm sure I've forgotten to tell you something, but that's the basics of where they are and what they do. Do they return to the same nest year after year, or do you know? Yeah, so she asked if they return the same nest every year, and yeah, often they do. Then they often, they do return to their natal, they tend to return to their natal lake where they hatched or a nearby lake. I mean, they can't all return to their natal lakes or there wouldn't be enough room. So they do disperse, but they tend to not disperse too far. So then the second half of the slide show, which... Before you get into the hygiene, is the dive, is it really, and what structure allows for that? So how deep is the dive and what was the second part? Oh, and what do they have for a strut like, is it their spleen isn't live or is there a dive bladder? What allows for deep dives? Well, so they can't, so what allows for deep dives? So we think they can go to 200 feet, but we don't think they usually do. They're visual predators, they have to see fish to catch them, so they're not gonna go much further than I don't even actually know how deep they go when it gets dark, but they're not gonna go beyond where it's light typically. So mostly shallow dives, and they do, I don't know about it, I don't think they have a dive bladder, but they do exhale, which is sort of counterintuitive because of what we do when we go underwater, we take in a deep breath. Loons and other diving birds, they actually exhale, and so they compress their whole body and they have, all the oxygen goes to their organs, but they actually don't take a deep breath, which is interesting, but I don't know that much about diving, that's the extent of my knowledge. Yes. Do the baby, initially you were talking about the males being aggressive towards each other, and I'm wondering if they exhibited that behavior prior to when they're in the seven year breeding, it would surprise me for birds to defend their range like that and then not breed. Right, right, so those, anybody who's on a territory is breeding, so yeah, so those juveniles in Maine are, and I should have been clear about this, I'm sorry, juveniles in Maine are anywhere really, when they, those first seven years, they're gonna bounce around between lakes. So sometimes you'll see, and this is a good thing to know in Maine when you're on a lake, if you see a big group of four or five or eight loons together, typically they'll be in the middle of a lake, those are non-breeders, so those are probably, they're either birds that tried to breed and failed or they're young birds, and so they're pretty social and they'll stay together and move around, and we think they just, they move around between fresh water and then they go back to the ocean. So in the summer, you can see loons on the saltwater all summer long in Maine, and those are all young birds, so yeah, that's a good point, they don't, until they have, until they're ready to breed, they don't have territories, because you're right, you wouldn't defend a territory unless you're gonna use it. So what are they doing in the winter besides fishing? How would they survive each cold? Well, you know, just they have, feathers are incredible insulators, they have fat, they have muscle and they're just, they're just, they're very social in the winter time, so unlike, and I should have mentioned in the summertime, breeding pairs are pretty isolated, they don't like a lot of company and they will chase everybody else away, but in the winter time, they're really social, we think they fish together, work together to fish, and I think they're just, you know, eating and staying warm as best they can, but I know it's amazing that it's warm out, that they stay warm out there, but think about puffins, seagulls, all those birds can do it. Yeah. I might not just understand about mating for life, but when you say they go back to the same nest, is it the same couple that go back to the same nest? Right, so do the same couple go back to the same nest. So that's what will happen for on average about seven years. So they, the average loon pair last seven years. So for about seven years, you'll have the same pair going back to the same territory. And then typically after about seven years, either another male will come in and challenge and win over the territory, or another female, it's usually the male, but females will do the same thing. So then you have turnover. And typically, so if there's a territorial pair, they've been there for a long time, one, a new male comes in, fights and chases off the territory of male, the female will usually stay with the new male who arrives. So they're not, they're really the sort of fidelity about loons are really faithful to their territory, as opposed to their mate. Anything else before I jump into the next section? Did the retired females hang out with the young non-weaned family? That's a good question. I would think so. Or they're gonna go try to find another territory someplace else. But yeah. Yeah, I wish I knew when I saw those flocks. Who had done what? That would answer a lot of questions that we have. All right, so I'm gonna jump in and tell you a little bit about the main loon count. So this is our 35th year coming up. And so for 35 years, we have been amassing information and talking to people and having citizen scientists go out and literally count loons for us. So what does that mean? It means on the third Saturday of every July, we have about 1400 volunteers across the state. They count loons on about 300-ish lakes across the state and they just go out like this on a boat. They have a pair of binoculars. There might be a couple of people in a boat. We coordinate so that everybody, all the counters have a lake or a section of a lake. So we make sure people are spread out, not on top of each other in terms of counting. And then we collect all their information back at the end of the summer. So it's just a one day count, but it doesn't, there's a ton of questions it does not answer, but one question it does answer is how are loons doing in the state? And here's part of the answer. So we get all that data back, we have a sampling, we have a sampling protocol we use so it doesn't matter if we have more counters or fewer counters, what matters is how we take our sample and we take our sample from the data that we get and this is the result. So the yellow line at the top is the number of adults and so this is an estimate based on the data were sent in by the citizen scientists. It's a loon population estimate is literally for the southern half of the state of Maine if you fold Maine in half. This is the area we cover is roughly below the 45th parallel from Rangeley to Calis, south. We have counters statewide and we have all that information, we have a lot of information doesn't go into this estimate, but this is where we have we feel confident about our counters in terms of the number of lakes that they're sampling. So you can see the number of adults has almost doubled from when the count started and really got standardized in 1984 to last year just under 3000 adults in the southern half of the state. So we know loons are doing, we know we have more loons now than we did when the count started and the count was really started because we were concerned about loons were disappearing from lakes, people weren't seeing as many loons as they had that they remembered as kids. So we definitely, who knows what was happening on the left side of that graph but we don't think it was good and that's why the loon count was created. So we can feel good about adults, we have more adults in the state. What we don't know about this line is we don't know how many are breeding. We're trying to tweak our protocol a little bit to get at that number to try to track breeders versus non-breeders, nests, birds with chicks and birds on nests. So we're trying to pick that apart but the other interesting thing about this graph is if you look at the red line at the bottom those are the number of chicks and what really stands out for chicks is that the number hasn't really changed much since 1984. It goes up some years and it goes down some years but there's no clear trend upwards for chicks. So even though we have more adults out there we're not producing any more chicks really than we did in the early 80s. So again, if you think back to a long-lived species that doesn't reproduce very, doesn't have a lot of young that really invests a lot in their young. When I think about that and I look at this graph you have to remember and then you think about how long it is till they breed seven, eight, nine, 10, 11 years. You can see that if we had a problem today in 2018, if we had a problem and no loons were produced or something catastrophic happened you really wouldn't see that effect till probably 10 years out till 2028 because of this lag in the breeding time. So I think it's just important to remember that we really need to keep common loons common. We need to keep them where they are and really be diligent about not letting that yellow line drop in the future and really be really diligent about making sure that this red line, yeah it's not increasing but it's also not decreasing either. So we want to keep that line flat. So just to run through some of the things we think about I used to go through this slide, these pictures slide by individually. But I don't do that anymore. It takes up a little bit too much of my presentation. So take a good look at this slide and the message I really want to get and the other reason I put them all together on one slide is the message is that there are a lot of things, a lot of threats and challenges that loons face on the water. They have predators on land looking for their eggs. They have predators underwater snatching them as chicks. So the fish and the snappy turtles are big chick predators. Minks are one of the biggest egg predators we know. They've got avian predators, ravens and other birds coming down from above. They have that loon sort of at the bottom there beside their raven. It's a loon with fishing line entangled around its bill. They have lead, they deal with lead poisoning from lead tackle which I'll talk about in more detail. They have boats, they have fireworks and all the things that come with fireworks in terms of lots of disturbance, lots of boat traffic. The power plant I put in there reminded me to talk to mention mercury. Mercury main has really high levels of mercury in our lakes and loons are one of the animals that they bioaccumulate mercury. The mercury goes into the long story but they go, the mercury settles in. It goes into the plankton which goes into the fish which goes into loon. So loons really accumulate a lot of mercury and we know it has an impact. So keep this in mind as we go through the rest of these threats and concerns. But that's a lot to deal with as a loon family, as a loon parents trying to raise chicks, you have to deal with all of these things over the course of the summer. And then I just had to put this in because this was an abandoned nest on MDI but I just thought it was such an amazing picture of these loons, of this mink. But as I mentioned, loons, minks are really big egg predators and they don't care if they're fresh or like these eggs are a couple months old and they're there. So those, everything I had on that slide were kind of the current threats that things were thinking about today. There's also a whole bunch of future threats that we're thinking about when we think about loon conservation. So a bunch of them are climate related. So water temperature, water quality and storm events are three big things that we're thinking about. So National Audubon has done this climate model for a lot of bird species. There's some debate about the variables they used to model and we could argue back and forth if this is the best model or not. But it doesn't really matter. The point is, whether it's exactly accurate or not, the point is if you look at climate variables and you model bird habitat, you can see what happens. So this is the current range of loons as of 2000. So the yellow is where they are in the summer and breeding and then the blue is where they are in the winter. And then the next slide is the modeled range in 2020. So you can see Maine is losing some of its loon habitat. Here it is in 2050 and then here it is in 2080. So the point being really, even if we hope, we hope these maps are wrong. Really, we hope loons are adaptable and the climate change is slower than we think it will. And we hope we'll have loons in Maine for a long time to come. But they are definitely a climate, they are definitely a species that will be affected by climate change. So some of the really direct links between climate change and loon habitat are water quality. So warmer water, more algae. You get these kinds of algal blooms and a bird who needs to sea fish to find them to eat is not gonna be successful on a lake like this. Intense rain events that come with climate change having intense rain events, lake levels rise quickly and what happens to a nest that's right beside a lake. If that water levels rise, those eggs will literally float away. So those big rain events are a challenge for loons. There are some mitigation methods. So there are floating platforms that people have put out and been successful with and they do work. They require a lot of maintenance, a lot of time, but they certainly work particularly on lakes with dams where the dam operator's gonna raise lake levels on purpose for power generation, for example. These have been a really good tool, but we certainly don't wanna see these statewide in Maine. The other things to talk about in terms of climate and future looking ahead, insects and diseases. So this is a slide of, this is a bird, this is a loon on a lake in Wisconsin. So in 19, no, no, gosh, I'm losing my decades here. 2014, Wisconsin had this really crazy summer. They had still had snow on the ground and they had a seven, I think they had a 70 degree day early in the spring and it produced like this black slide. I don't know what the word is for it. Bonanza, this like perfect storm for black flies. So they had an amazing hatch of black flies. So if you look at this loon, all that little fuzzy, all the fuzzy bits around it, those are all black flies and they're actually a black fly that is adapted to loons and specializes on loons in Wisconsin. We don't know if we have them here, but they have them there. And so in 2014, 80% of nesting attempts in Wisconsin failed because you just can't sit there. You know, anyone, you all know, you've been in the woods with black flies. None of us could take that and loons can't either. So they leave a nest, they have to get in the water, they have to get away and then the predation or the hot sun will get eggs that are abandoned on a day like this. So really not just theoretical impacts, but impacts that we're actually seeing on the ground now. The other thing, I'm sorry, it's another gross slide, but my vet friends insist that I put at least one in. So I did the fish and then I did this one. So just to mention quickly, there's some really kind of scary emerging diseases that are coming for loons. So on the left, blood parasites, malaria is, you know, avian malaria is a big disease. I've been told by vets that, you know, most robins that you see have avian malaria. It's pretty much, it's everywhere. It's very common in the bird community, bird ecosystem. It's not quite the right word. But lots of birds have malaria, avian malaria. It doesn't jump to us. Loons have, we've never, let's see, when we started collecting dead loons in 2000, no, gosh, what's 25 years ago from now? 1995. Ish, we started in 1993. We started collecting dead loons and there was never any evidence of malaria. Then about 10 years ago, the vets started seeing more and more signs of malaria, evidence that malaria was in the blood of these dead loons they were collecting. And then two years ago in 2016, we actually had a loon die from malaria. It was a bird that was brought to the UNH vet lab and they were able, it was a fresh bird. They were able to definitively say that the bird had died from avian malaria. So a new disease really rapidly making itself known into a species that prior did not have that disease. So definitely something to pay attention to. These other ones are some, these weird hookworms that get into their throat. They're carried by a crustacean. So we never saw them before. They were always on saltwater. Those are starting to show up in fresh water, which is a little strange. And then the one over here is aspergillosis, which is a stress induced fungal infection in their air sacs. And it's stress related. You might wonder why you've never seen a loon in a zoo or at the main wildlife park. Loons don't, they don't adapt to captivity. They're very high stress birds. And often what happens if you have a bird in a high stress situation, I have a loon in a high stress situation. This aspergillosis, this fundus that's in their air sacs, it's there all the time, but what happens is when they're stressed, it just, it blows up and it can be a leading. It is one of the leading causes of death for loons. So just three things to take note of. I mentioned mercury. I just have a few, few more slides. And then I have the exciting ones, which is the what you can do section. So I mentioned mercury really impacting loons, loons with high levels of mercury don't attend their chicks. They don't feed their chicks. They don't spend as much time with their chicks. And so they have lower productivity. I mentioned about, I just want to mention a few quick things around fishing. Entangled loon, monofilament entanglement is an ongoing issue with loons in Maine. Another really, the leading cause of mortality in Maine is lead sinker. So I just want to spend a couple of slides on lead sinkers. So this is a loon that died from lead sinker, ingesting a lead sinker. One of the really interesting things about lead sinker mortality is that it really affects adults, it affects breeding adults. So the loons that we collect that have died from lead poisoning, they're otherwise they're perfectly healthy. They have big muscle mass. They're beautiful. They're breeding birds. And then the one thing they did wrong was they somehow ingested a lead, piece of lead tackle. So I mentioned the vets down in Tufts who help us out and do these necropsties to tell us the cause of death. They've been doing it since 1987. This is the, these red circles are, these are x-rays of loons that have died from lead poisoning. And so we test the, they test the blood. And so we know that there are high levels of lead in the blood, but then we can also see the lead in 99% of the cases. You can see the lead object in the gizzard as well. So they look like this. So the picture on the left is a bunch of rocks and gravel. And then you can probably see the shiny lead sinker like up in the top, right? So loons are just like any other bird. If you have chickens, you know, they, they peck around in the dirt. They need to ingest dirt, gravel, to digest their food. So the, the slide on the left, oh, I guess I did have one more graphic medical slide. That's a gizzard and it's a big muscle. And just think back to like eating your turkey when your grandmother used to cook it. And my mother always cooked the gizzard. I never thought it was very appetizing, but you know, it comes in, you know, people eat it. And it's just this big muscle muscly thing. And that's what's, that's what's grinding up their food. So birds have to eat grit and gravel to, to get in there, to, it's, they eat it. It sits in the grout in the gizzard and then the gizzard does this big muscle and it grinds everything up. So unfortunately for loons, the, because they're big birds, they're getting big, you know, they're not going to pick up sand. They want big gravel like in that picture over there. And unfortunately they lead, there's, we think there's two ways they get lead sinkers in their system. One is that they pick them off, out of the gravel. This is a picture of a gravel bed, you know, shoreline in New York state. And can anybody see lead sinkers in there? There's a lot. This is how many lead sinkers there are. So one thing is if you're a loon and you're picking up gravel like this, you know, you have no way to discern the gravel from the lead. And it just happens that a very, the common size of lead tackle that's used in Maine and a lot of freshwater lakes is just the size that loons are going to ingest. The other way they do it is they, if you have a, you know, a fish that has a line with a lead sinker attached to it, like a angler has cut the line or it's gotten tangled and they've just cut it. So those are the two ways we think they get it. Loons that have lead poisoning or they act strangely, they beach themselves, they swim in circles. You know, there's a whole lot of literature on lead poisoning. It's definitely not the way to go. It's painful. It's really medically just what lead does to your nervous system is really unpleasant. So these birds die pretty quickly and not very, not quickly and not painlessly. So this brings me to my last section, which is the uplifting. Now that you've heard, you heard all the great things about loon natural history, then you heard all the depressing things about what's going wrong and what they, all their threats, but now is the exciting part because there are lots of things that we can do, any of us can do. And so one of the big ones, of course, is to fish without lead. So we've been working really hard on a fish lead free campaign for the last, well, we've actually been doing it for a long time, but we've ramped it up in the last couple of years because Maine has a ban on the use and the sale of lead sinkers and ounce alert less or lead-headed jigs, which are these hooks with like a ball of lead attached to them. If they are, if they don't have paint on them and they're two and a half inches or less, they're banned in Maine. So you might ask, well, why are these painted ones legal? And the answer is politics. So we had to give on something and we gave on that. But in reality, the paint doesn't do anything. Once a loon eats, once a loon adjusts the lead that gizzard with the rocks and the gravel, just grind that paint right off the jig. And then the paint, I mean, the lead levels just elevate really quickly in the bloodstream. So you could do even more than the law asks you to do and you can actually use no lead at all is really what we would like to see. But it's a huge step. So there's quite a timeline for lead sinker legislation and it started with a ban on sinkers a half ounce or less. And then we showed that, well, loons are still dying and then we got this expansion that was completed just in September of 2017. It was phased in a bunch of different phases and but it's all in place now and we actually have a law in the book. So that's exciting. There's lots of lead-free alternatives, lots of when we first started in on this lead sinker issue in the early 2001, 2002 is when we had our first legislation. It was really challenging and that was one of the arguments against the banners. It's hard to find replacement tackle. But now there's a lot on the market and there's a lot of buzz out there that it's actually more gives you more options because every sinker sounds different underwater. It bounces, it sounds differently when it hits different rocks and vegetation. And so it's actually a good thing that there's these different kinds, different metals and different kinds of sinkers that people can use. We have a website, fishleadfree.org. What's really exciting about this website is it is not just Maine. We've got a lot of, we have a lot of partners involved. So Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, New York, Michigan, Wisconsin are all have tabs and they have tabs on the lead-free page and we're trying to get everybody to use the same logo across states because as anglers are moving across states, we'd like them to see the same, you know, the same, I'm not a marketer, but even I know if you see the same thing, the more times you see it, the more it will resonate with you. And so we're very excited New Hampshire's using this logo and we're using all the same outreach materials and we'd like that to be bigger, move beyond New Hampshire, but certainly it's really helpful to have that extra messaging going beyond just the state's borders. Another thing you can do is host a lead tackle exchange. So we have an inventory, it's a little low at the moment, but we'll order more for the springtime. We have lead free tackle and we have kits that we can give people if you wanna go set up at your library or your Lions Club or a town event or anything, we can send you a package with lead free tackle and some stickers and some information on how to do it and you can set up and ask anglers to bring in lead tackle, you give them lead free alternatives and just to help ease that transition. You can share what you've learned. We have a lot of lead free, we have posters, we have pamphlets, you know, little rat cards that are really good for like town offices. If you have a town office that has a set of rat cards, we can get you those. Then moving away from lead sinkers, there's other things to do. I didn't talk about this program, Signs of the Seasons, but they have loons or one of their focal species and we've coordinated with them. They are looking for people to go out and make regular observations of loons or report the timing or phenology of when you see different behaviors of loons. So they have a whole program and a training and everything around their program and we partner with them to do that. You can participate in the annual loom count. So if anybody saw the, I don't know if anyone caught this, but April 1st of this year, we pulled off a little April Fool's joke and the joke was or the headline and the media piece we put out was that this is the year the loons learned to count. So, but we do have an annual, we do have our annual loom count. I mentioned it and we are always looking for more people to help. So if you have a lake in mind, if you're interested in traveling to a new lake, just let me know and I can hook you up with our database and see where we have room for new counters. Just have a couple more slides. May or may not be relevant to you, but if you are living on a lake or you know someone who lives on a lake, we also partner with the Mean Lakes Society. They have a program called Lakesmart where they meet with landowners and look at how their camp is, how their run is, how their runoff is, and they give these Lakesmart awards to people who meet high standards for water quality. And then what we have is that we've added a loomsmart component to that program. So there's an additional set of criteria for the camp owners, not only just about their physical camp, but also their behavior. Do you know where your loom territories are? You know not to go near them not to approach too closely with your motorboat, all those kinds of things. So if you know anyone on a lake, point them towards Mean Lakes Society and so they can get a Lakesmart award. So I think I tried to cram a lot in and then finally I just wanna say thank you. These are all those photographs. Hopefully you thought they were amazing. I think they are incredible set of photographs and I did not take a single one. They're all volunteers who submitted photos to us. So I wanna be sure to acknowledge all of them. Whew, and I hope I covered everything, but happy to take a question. So thank you so much. Thank you. Thank you. On the loom camp, I was interested in trying to guide into that data a little bit more. For example, certain lakes would be more susceptible to temperature stress. Yeah. Yeah. If you look at the data to see is there, you know the changes in the patterns in certain lakes that are more stressed by temperature? No, we haven't, but we're on 35 years and so one of my goals for this year is to get the funding or find somebody to what we need as a statistician who can really dive in. So the question was if there's lots of, I think there's a wealth of information in the loom count data and we've only tapped, like you saw that graph, we've only tapped a percent of it. So that's one of our goals for the 35th year is to find somebody. You can really dive deep into it and tell us more. So I'm sorry that I'm not the person to do that, but if you know of anyone, send them my way. Yes. Do you think there used to be lake associations and lake impact on the society? Yeah. Well, we work with Maine Lake Society and I certainly talk to a lot of lake associations over the, what's that? As far as dating them. Yes, I think, yeah, I talk to a lot of them. I don't have, you know, I don't, I only communicate directly with the ones I know about. So I'm sure there's lots that I don't know about. So if you know of anybody particular, send them my way. What's happening in the northern half of Maine? Yeah, so what's happening in the northern half of Maine? That's a great question. So we do aerial surveys in northern Maine. The last, we're due for another set. I think the last round was in 1996. So what's interesting about northern Maine is it's not very loon friendly, or no, I shouldn't say that, not loon friendly. It's, they have really different lakes. They have a lot of granite. Like if you think of Baxter State Park, a lot of granite shoreline with how, you know, Baxter is this beautiful place. There's only, I think, two lakes in Baxter that really regularly have nesting ones. They have loons fishing, but so not as many wetlands, sort of marshy areas as you have in the southern half of the state. So the last estimate, and it hasn't really changed since the first aerial surveys were in the early 80s, is about probably 1500-ish birds in the rest of the state from that 45th parallel north. But again, that's the other thing. We have all this data from the 35 years, a lot of it's in northern Maine, and how can we use that data to tell us more? So the loons have told us a lot, but we haven't listened to all of it. So, anything else? Yeah. I noticed on the loon counter, there was a fair bit of noise in that data. Yeah. Maybe you had any thought, I mean, is that just the accuracy of the counts themselves? Yeah, let me, I'll just, so the question was about the loon count. Graph and some noise, and I will, let me just see if I can, I think I can get back to it. I mean, it's one particular case, would we jump in on the 18,000 to 25,000 consecutive years? Yeah. Let's just see if there's a possibility. So, we know, I'll tell you, so I came in in 1998, so I feel really good about that data because I was there. But 96 was a really, we do the count rain or shine. And so, and our protocol should allow us to make an estimate no matter how many people go out, but, you know, loons are harder to see if it's pouring rain. And so 96 was a torrential rain year, and we know that that was a bad year and same with 2007. So our protocol, you know, we just, what's one of the things we're trying to collect more information about is detectability, you know, what's the, is the sun out, is the lake chopped, and is the lake choppy. And because we think, we know that if it's, it's actually if it's really sunny, and the water, you know, the water, you know, it's like sort of glittery that loons really fade, are harder to see on a really sunny day. And we know they're really, they're harder to see if it's choppy, if there's waves. So we're trying to refine our methods a little bit and try to get at some of that. I really need that statistician. Anything else? Thank you so much for listening.