 Yeah. Okay, Mark, we are recording where to do your intro. Perfect. Good evening, everyone. Can you hear me? Good. Thank you. Thank you all for coming out. I think we're going to have a really interesting talk tonight. Just wanted to remind you of the other two talks we have coming this evening. We're going to talk about what's going on on October 12. Ron Butler is going to speak with us about Maine lichens. My son has studied lichens a bit and says they're absolutely fascinating. This was my request. We hike a lot and we see all these things growing on rocks. And I thought, gee, it's time to learn more about that. So we hope to see you all. To learn about lichens in October. I'm going to start with Sally Stockwell, who some of you know from Maine Audubon. Is going to be speaking again by zoom, because she has to be in New Mexico. Taking care of her daughter's new baby, I think. He's going to let us know. Where our birds go in winter. And also what. Winter birds come to us in winter. So we're going to find out where all our birds disappear to before they come back in the spring. So we have with us tonight. Dr. Mark Pocrus. He is. Probably known to a lot of you. He has been studying loons. Since 1987. And has done a tremendous amount of work on lead poisoning. And I'm going to talk about why this discovered that this is one of the things killing the loons and why this is happening. And I'm sure has a lot to say about. How much longer this will go on, even though we have now exchange programs for a fisherman. There's still lead in the bottom of streams and ponds. I'm sure. So I am not going to take any more of his time. I'm not going to take any more of his time. And he is going to speak and then I guess hold your questions will be easier since I'll have to enter. I'll have to go around and he says yes on that. I'll come back up here. Take your questions and relay them to him. Over the speaker. Great. Let's get started. Okay. Can everybody hear me? All right. Can I make that assumption? I'm going to go through a lot of slides fairly quickly. To talk about a lot of the different topics and loon biology and conservation. And the idea, my idea is that I want to stimulate discussion. I want to point out a lot of things that I've been working on and that many of my colleagues have been working on. Introduce you a little more to the biology of loons. And then I'm going to go through a lot of slides fairly quickly. To talk about a lot of the different topics in loon biology and how it works. And then I'm going to talk about the biology of loons and then see where you want to go with the discussion. So this is where I have worked for many, many years. I'm technically retired now. But I spent much of my professional career at the veterinary school at Tufts down in central Massachusetts. Running the wildlife. Hospital there. And also the center for conservation medicine. And so here's what we're going to talk about today. The biology of loons and a lot about. Many of the things that threaten loons, not just in New England, but all across North America. So for those of you who don't know loons well, let's quick survey here. They're probably among the most aquatic birds on the planet. Significantly more aquatic than penguins. Pysivorous, of course, means mostly fish eating. They're interesting in that they breed on freshwater and winter and they have a relatively low reproductive rate. So they're going to live a long time, but not produce many chicks per year. And that's one of the conservation challenges. When we look at where common loons breed, by the way, there are five species of loons. Birds in the genus Gavia. We'll talk more about that. And from an ecological point of view, they're what we call a case selected species in that they're late in maturing. They have long life spans and they have a relatively low reproductive rate. So they're common loons. Birds in the genus Gavia in the world. And common loons are the only one that breeds in the lower 48 states. The other four are much more boreal, much more northern species. So if you look at common loons, frankly, almost all of them are Canadian. And most of those are in Ontario. There's a few that bring it Greenland, a few in Iceland and a very few in. We'll come back to that, but in the Northeast, Maine is the loon capital. We have more loons in Maine than any other. Of the lower 48 states, except for Minnesota, Minnesota has about three times as many loons as Maine does. But almost all the loons are north of us. And if you look at the map, the blue area is the breathing range and the. I don't know what color you call that orangey area is the winter in range. So you'll see they're breeding along the coast, primarily where the waters are open and food is available. And when you look at migration patterns, it's relatively simple. The birds that breed in the East go to the Atlantic. The birds that breed in the West go to the Pacific and the birds that breed in the central part of the continent, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Manitoba, Alberta, so forth, pretty much go straight south to the Gulf of Mexico. Now we know everybody loves loons go to any gift shop in New England. You'll see all kinds of things there and incredibly charismatic species. You never know what you're going to find with loons on them. As I said, they're incredibly aquatic to the extent that they like to nest right at the edge of the water. They can't walk on land. Period. They can push themselves along on their, on their bellies, on their sternums, but they can't stand up and walk. And so basically they like to nest where they can just push themselves immediately into the water or fall off the nest into the water. This is a natural loon nest and you can see it's only, you know, inches if that above water level on this lake. Increasingly loons are being encouraged to nest on artificial platforms. We can talk about that later if people would like to and why we're using more platforms and the successes. We can talk about that later if people would like to. I think this has a little roof on it. That has two functions. One, it's a predator guard. And the other one is to try and shield them from. Increasing temperatures. Keep it a little cooler. We'll talk more about that. Loons like two eggs. They're fairly big eggs. They're about the size of a goose egg. They're camouflaged in color. And then they're in the water. After 29 days, the eggs hatch and you get these gorgeous little chicks. About 150, 160 grams coming out of the egg. And. Interestingly enough, they stay on the nest. One day. Sometimes two, two is the exception. And then they enter the water and they're in the water for the next. Five or six years. They're incredibly aquatic. So they start small, they go into the water. Small. They, as with other birds. They sometimes rate. Get rides on the parents back. This isn't just cute. This probably saves them some energy. It helps keep them from cooling off in the cold water. And certainly can protect them from some predators. And we'll talk about that later. They grow fast. They also eat a lot of invertebrates. Crayfish, dragonfly larvae, leeches among them. We can talk about the advantages and disadvantages of those. And some of the ecological cycling. Again, if you'd like to later on. But until they're about. Nine or 10 weeks old, almost all the food is provided by the parents. The chicks poke around a little bit, but they're not effective at feeding themselves. They're not effective at feeding themselves. They're not effective at feeding themselves. They're between 10 and 12 weeks old by 12 weeks. They're pretty independent. When they're swimming under water, they're foot propel divers. They're not like penguins and not swimming with their wings. And they're big, heavy birds with relatively small wings. So it takes them a long runway. To take off. From a lake. And oftentimes in the summer, they don't fly. They don't get off and they, they get away that way. And this one's taking off for fall migration, because it's on its way to the ocean. And most loons, as we talked about before, winter and marine environments. Need a lot of invertebrates like crabs. And you'll notice that it's molded, it's plumage. They don't look like loons as we expect postcard loons to look like in the winter. But they're not mistaken for other things, including ducks. And many people don't even know that they have loons. In their area in the wintertime. Increasingly with some studies that are going on, we're finding that there are areas where loons are starting to do some wintering on freshwater lakes. This isn't a particularly new phenomenon. It was seen at first documented by Lewis and Clark on some rivers and Lake Chelan and Washington state. It's been a long time ago, but relatively recently on Lake Jocassee in South Carolina, they found fairly large populations of loons wintering on freshwater. And we can speculate based on what we know with environmental changes and particularly marine environmental changes, why loons might be using this environment. Part of it, and we'll talk more about this later, is the earth has some problems. And we're responsible for most of them. And we'll talk much more about this as we go along, but we know that loons and most other species, including ourselves are subjected to many synergistic environmental stressors and their cumulative over time. So here's just a few of the things that we know are affecting loons. Some of these are have been well known for over a hundred years, shoreline development and boating disturbance and things of that nature. Some of these, some of the pathogens and climate change and lead fishing tackle problems are relatively more recently discovered. One of the things that we started back in the late 80s and early 90s is we figured nobody has enough expertise to do all the studies that need to be done. And we have put together a regional working group, the Northeast loon study working group, which has the terrible acronym Nelswig. But you can see that we have a variety of agencies and personnel from all over the six New England states, New York state and Eastern Canada. We get together once a year to coordinate loon research and data handling in the Northeast. We have two ongoing regional studies, one and we'll talk about it first are the live loon studies. And this is the fun part. You get to watch live wonderful loons and watch them carry their babies. And this is where we go out and capture loons and ban them and take samples for laboratory analysis. We'll talk more about that. The other one that's not quite so pleasant, but I think is fairly important is understanding the threats to loons by looking at why loons die. And those are the mortality studies. And that's the side of the equation that I've been focusing on for the last, well, this is our 34th year of the mortality studies. So I was glad to hear that there are students in the audience there because we try very hard to involve both undergraduate and graduate students in our research projects. I had seven students working for me this summer in Vermont, New Hampshire and Maine, and I had a lot of students who had a lot of experience with fieldwork like Olivia and lab work like Trisha. And in the live loon studies, you know, as I said, part of it's observational, but a lot of it is you got to catch the loons. This is not easy. They're big strong birds. They don't want to be caught. And we use a night lighting technique. And it's, it's an adventure. It's a rodeo to catch loons at night and then process them and take blood samples at night. And so you, you do all your field work in the middle of the night. And then you have to come back to the lab at four o'clock in the morning and start processing your samples. Part of that is telemetry. We're not currently doing much telemetry on loons, but Kevin Kino in the Midwest and Dave Evers and the crew at BRI here in Maine have a history of doing some, both internal and external telemetry on loons. And if you're interested in that, we can talk about that further at some point, but one of the things that telemetry tells us is where these loons go. So if you look at Kevin's work in the Midwest, you'll see that these are the birds that are migrating, you know, well over a thousand miles to get down to the Gulf Coast. And Kevin has a website where you can actually see these birds real time and look at their transmitter locations, work that's been done here in the, in the East by the people at the loon preservation committee in New Hampshire show that our loons really aren't going so far. Occasionally one goes further south than Long Island, New York, but most of them stay in the region where food is relatively abundant. And again, we can talk about the ecological reasons that Midwestern loons are different than Eastern ones. We also get involved in loon rescues, working with many lake associations and the public and state agencies like the IFW, wildlife rehabilitators all across Maine, the US and Canada, and the public of course, rescuing loons, getting them to rehab. Some of this in the summer, some of this late in the fall when the lakes start to freeze, you know, what's supposed to happen. Ecologically is that the birds are supposed to migrate south before the lakes freeze, but every once in a while the loons get stuck. Now part of this is birds that aren't healthy, that can't migrate. Part of this is birds that are just plain unlucky because of the timing of the freeze. Part of this is probably a phenomenon related to climate change. And we can talk about this, but what's happening is, if you look at, this is Dr. Nina Shock from New York, with the bird that she's got in her hand. And I don't know how well you know loons, but this bird has no flight feathers. And if you look at this loon over here, all of its primaries are gone. Loons do what's called the delayed simultaneous wing molt. And they're supposed to do this on the ocean. They're supposed to migrate to the ocean, drop all their wing feathers and they're flightless for, we think roughly about six weeks. If they don't get off the lake before they molt, then they can't get off the lake. And that's what happened here in New York with Nina's bird or here with John Cooley netting that bird on a small open patch of water in New Hampshire. You have to have the right equipment to do this. People can die if you fall into a lake that time of the year. And so having well-trained people and proper equipment is incredibly important. These birds, when possible, are rehabilitated and released. Avi and Haven, many of you probably know as a rehabilitation center in central Maine that does particularly well with loons. This is one of their indoor loon pools. And if the birds make it, they get banned and released. This is Mark Payne from maybe in Haven and releasing a bird down near Belfast. The mortality study is not so fun sometimes. And certainly not so sexy much of the time. We've been doing it for a long time. We've just passed our 4,000th dead loon, which is incredible to me. This is Michelle Neyland is a veterinarian that I work with who's done a lot of nicopsies with us. And this is just an old saying that pathologists use. And that is you really can't understand the life cycle of any species that you want to protect if you only study the birth side of the equation. You really need to understand why animals die and where they die and when they die to get a picture of the whole cycle. And so both of these pieces, the mortality study and the living loon study are incredibly important over time. So lots of causes of injury and death, oil entanglement in plastic fishing line and other environmental things. But some of these are. Natural loons fight. On the lakes. In the spring when they get there after right out. And much of the summer and they're big and they're strong and they have really impressive weapons on their faces. Those beaks can do serious damage to one another to people who are trying to rescue them. They've been known to put holes in canoes. And so you don't want to underestimate them. We see a variety of parasites. We see neoplasia. We see cancers and tumors. We see all different kinds of pathology going on with these animals. We also see predation. And again, we can talk more about this in the Q and A if you'd like to. Some of it like the raccoon is more on the nest side of things where they're taking eggs and young. Some of it in the water is aquatic predators. And so we see a variety of predators. Predators taking. Young loans of a large mouth basket and easily swallow a young loan. Or. Predators like bald eagles that can take sometimes adults or young. There's a bald eagle with a dead loan. But so much of what we see is due to human activities. And a lot of it has to do with. How about it? With people actually running into loons, either accidentally or on purpose with people disturbing loons. This is a loon nesting platform. Caught by a trail cam. And those people in the kayak, you think about kayaks has been quiet and slow and they shouldn't disturb a loon. But those people are seriously. And then we get things like gunshot, whether it's bullets or from a shotgun as in this case. We see dangers in the marine environment. From oil. And from commercial fishing. Things like gill netting, troll netting. All sorts of things take fair numbers of marine birds as bycatch. Not to mention marine mammals and sea turtles and many other species. We look at toxicology. We're looking at both contaminants, things that. Either might be naturally occurring in the environment. Or contaminants that people are putting to the, into the environment like lead mercury and many metals. But we're also looking at biotoxins. I think many of you have heard some of the stories about loons and other aquatic birds being used as sentinels for environmental mercury. And so, I think that's one of the things that we're looking at. And so, I think that the food chain and mercury, at least the organic forms of mercury are fairly fat, soluble. And tend to concentrate in loons and bald eagles and people. And things that are eating toward the top end of the food chain. But one that I focused on as was mentioned before is lead poisoning. And this is one, unfortunately, from your area this week. This is a loon that was beached on great pond. And by the time the birds were in the water, they would have been in the water all day. They saw the fishing gear in there. They tried to get the fishing gear out. This is lead and the bird is dead at this point. Most of the time, by the time birds was led poisoning are recovered. They can't be treated. They're too far down in the whole process. Many organizations and agencies are. Supporting lead, anglers groups to do lead fishing gear exchanges with the IFMW and Maine Audubon Society. You'll find that many boat launches. There are collection sites for monofilament fishing line and for lead fishing gear to try and get this deadly stuff out of the environment. But what I want to focus on a little bit are some of those larger scale changes of the planet as a whole. And, you know, I'm old. I was at the first Earth Day and Rachel Carson was one of my heroes. And I remember all the things that we talked about. We were talking about climate change then. Doesn't seem like we fixed it, but we were talking about it. Because everybody knows how important water is and how we need to protect all the water on the planet if we're gonna save ourselves and many of these other species. Rob Aldo is a Canadian biologist who has studied acid rain for a long time and published this article in the early 1980s in Canadian Geographic. One of the things we've noticed and we think might be an important signal of climate change is if you look at the historical southern border of common loon breeding, you'll see they bred in Northern New Jersey. They bred in Western Pennsylvania. They bred throughout a lot of the Midwestern states down here into Wyoming, parts of Colorado, Northern California. The red line is the current Southern limit of common loon breeding. And so you can see it's moving north. What is that telling us? Why is it happening? Well, we know things are getting warmer. We know sea level is rising. We know the chemistry of the ocean is changing. Anybody in Maine is looking at lobsters. They're looking at all kinds of things. The map on the right is from the Union of Concerned Scientists showing, this is for the state of Massachusetts, but showing what the climate in Massachusetts is gonna be like by the end of the century if we don't significantly change our emissions. Massachusetts will have a climate like South Carolina. It's gonna be a very different world. And what's associated with that, I think is like water level alterations. Some areas will have more rain. Some areas will have less rain. And for birds like loons that nest so close to the surface of the water, this is a critical thing. We'll notice that as water level changes, loon nests may get flooded. These are pictures I took a couple of years ago. This is a loon nest on Tadipond in Penobscot. You can see there's a single egg in the nest. This is a week later. When I went to check it, the water level is up to here and I went looking for that egg and it was in about three feet of water out here. And that's the loon egg in my hand. So changes in water level are critical to species like this that are so aquatic and nest so close to the edge. But also changes in water quality due to increases in nutrients, due to temperature changes and due to contaminants. Algal blooms are particularly problematic and we'll get to that. One of the things we see with climate change is we see increasing numbers of biting flies. These are loons in Wisconsin being attacked by black flies. And there are a number of instances, including some here in Maine where the black flies have gotten so dense that the loons have abandoned the nests. The loon preservation committee in New Hampshire is putting thermal sensors in loon nests and has game cameras out and documenting increasingly the adults are overheating. As daily temperatures rise, mean temperatures, the loons are panting more. The adults are getting off the nests more to cool themselves, leaving the eggs more vulnerable to predation. Not only that, but you have to think about the eggs. That's a loon egg. If you're an embryo inside a growing loon egg, all of your metabolism has to take place through that egg shell. The carbon dioxide has to get out. The oxygen has to get in. This, by the way, is an X-ray of a loon egg. You can see the baby loon in there. And one of the things that we know from a long time ago from the poultry industry, but also from zoos and other things is as incubation temperatures go up, there's an optimal incubation temperature for each species where you get the maximum hatch. But as that incubation temperature goes up, all of a sudden the eggs start to die at a much greater rate. And we're starting to see this in some southern areas with loon eggs. We have students, this is Kara and Michelle, outstudying all aspects of Lake biology, looking at plankton sampling, looking at biotoxin cycling, by looking at both zoan phytoplankton. You wouldn't think that veterinary students would be learning about phytoplankton, but it's important to stuff. And that ties into things like botulism outbreaks, which we're increasingly seeing on many lakes and especially the Great Lakes. And we have had at this point, some years in which as many as 4,000 migrating loons have died on the Great Lakes from botulism. And this is a photograph from 2013. And this partly has to do with climate change, it partly has to do with introduction of exotic invasive species, and it partly has to do with biotoxins. But we're seeing other biotoxins. Here in New England, we're seeing a biotoxin called BMAA, it's a toxic amino acid. The folks at University of New Hampshire are doing a lot of work on it, and it causes brain lesions in a lot of birds. This is a bald eagle brain, but we do have a couple of loons from New Hampshire, not from Maine, like Moscoma in Northern New Hampshire that have had very similar looking brain lesions. Another thing we're seeing increase is fungal respiratory disease. As the climate gets warmer and some areas get moisture, fungi grow better. And loons turn out to be exquisitely sensitive to fungal respiratory disease. A scary one that we've just recently discovered, and we're working on with Dr. Ellen Martenson at University of Vermont and Inga Sidor at University of New Hampshire, is avian malaria. And this is one of the advantages of long-term studies. We've been taking blood samples on loons since 1987 in New England, and I can tell you with 100% certainty that in 1987, 88, and 990, there was 0% incidence of avian malaria in loons in New England. And we have looked at hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of blood slots. We can tell you now today, this parasite is killing breeding loons in New England. And we are seeing an increase on an annual basis. And Dr. Martenson's lab is looking, not just at loons, but looking at the emergence of this group of parasites in a lot of other species. We mentioned before introduction of exotic species, and you have to think of the whole ecological system here. It can be fish that are dumped into lakes. It can be invertebrates like snails. This is the Chinese mystery snail, now found in many of the main lakes. It can be introduced crayfish or other introduced, and they can be introduced on purpose for fishing. They can be introduced as bait. They can be introduced from people dumping their aquaria into lakes, but these can decimate aquatic systems and often can carry infectious diseases and parasites. One of the parasites that snails can carry is what's called a thorny-headed worm, acanthosephala. We never saw these in loons back in the 80s. Now it's fairly common and it can be fatal. And so Danielle Doria, who's a biologist for Maine ISW, has put together a collection of data from loons that have come through the mortality study just to give you a sense of what's killing loons here in New England. You'll notice that the two biggest categories are lead poisoning and we don't know. We can talk about that more later on. Basically, we don't have a lot of money for this work, and we can't always do the kind of laboratory testing we'd like to really nail down problems, but lead poisoning is huge. We find in any area where loons and fishing have been studied together in Canada, the United States, the incidence of loons dying from lead poisoning is between 20 and 30%, so Maine is right on track, except for New Hampshire. New Hampshire, it's 48%. Many more loons die of lead poisoning in New Hampshire. But we also see fishing line entanglement is significant. And one of the ones that we're seeing here blunt trauma, and this is trauma by boats, is increasing significantly in recent years. We're looking at a lot of other pollutants as we look for more funding for this. There are all kinds of chemicals out there and unfortunately toxicology costs. So we're working hard to try and understand all these threats. We're studying live loons, we're studying dead loons. Partly we're doing this because we love loons. Partly we're doing it because we're concerned about aquatic systems in general, and partly we are selfish as a species because we depend on water. Whether it's marine environment or fresh water, we are as dependent on aquatic systems as any other living thing on the planet. Some recommended reading, there's a couple of classic old books. Joan Dunning's book is not hard science. It's very poetic and beautifully written. Judy McIntyre's book for a long time was The Bible. Judy is the Jane Goodall of loons. She's still around, she's 89 this year. Lives in upstate New York and doesn't do field work anymore. But the newest book, Jim Peruk is at St. Joseph's College here in Maine and has spent much of his last 30 years studying loons in the Midwest and the Northeast and the Gulf Coast after the oil spill. And just about a year ago, came out with his book on common loons. And I would record all three of these, it's great reading. These are some of the collaborating groups we have working on loons. And I should say, I mentioned before our regional Nelswig group of the six New England States, New York and Eastern Canada. But we have loon working groups that span the continent. We have monthly working, monthly virtual meetings of three continent wide loon groups. We have a citizen science working group like working with lake associations and developing educational materials. We have a rescue and rehabilitation working group working with rehabilitators and veterinarians on better way to help loons. And we have a field research group headed by Doug Tozier from Canada that focuses on developing better research techniques to understand the environment. So with that, you always have to end with a pretty picture of a healthy loon. So let me stop there. And hopefully this has generated some interest and some questions and we'll see where you folks wanna take the discussion. Questions. So she's asking, saying, can you hear me? Yeah, I can hear you. One of her slides of contaminants right after Mercury, you had listed organic something. What was the organic something? And that's what she's questioning, I think. Is that correct? Could you expand on that? Sure, without going into huge detail, basically there are what we call legacy organic contaminants, things like PCBs, DDT, malathion, a lot of those sorts of things, which when we have the funds, we look for in loon tissues because they're still out there. And some of them are still causing problems. We're also looking at the Neonicotinide pesticides. We started to look at that a couple of years ago and have just started the folks at the Loon Preservation Committee in New Hampshire have found some alarming levels of the PFAS, the forever chemicals in loons there. And we are working now with main inland fisheries and wildlife, we started gathering samples. We don't have the money, but we have the samples in the freezer. So we're gonna be looking at some of the forever chemicals. There's a graduate student at College of the Atlantic, Rachel, who's doing some work on marine mammals and to develop some laboratory expertise on that. We're looking for more collaborator. I mean, in the toxicologic world, we're looking for a more funding because we know that there's stuff out there that we can't afford to look at. And B, we're looking for more collaborators who would like to work with us on these sorts of things. Thank you. Other questions? I can't hear you. The question is, are there aquatic birds other than the loons which are also affected by the land toxicity? Or is that familiar to the loon? And not just aquatic birds. You know, I'm gonna question my sanity for a minute. If you're interested, and I would offer this either to the Audubon Society or to the university there, I've been working for the last, you know, roughly 40 years on lead poisoning and lead is not unique to fishing gear. We have issues with lead paint. I'm sure you're all familiar with inner city children and Flint, Michigan and polluted water. We have issues with fishing gear. We have issues with hunting gear and lead getting into the environment and poisoning non-target species like bald eagles and gold needles and scavengers and California condors. And if you wind me up and turn me on, I can talk anywhere from 30 minutes to about four hours on lead poisoning. You probably don't want me to do that tonight, but I'm on several national and international committees on lead poisoning. And I've just finished a document for the European Union, which is working on some lead poisoning issues right at the moment associated with hunting and fishing gear. So there's a tremendous amount known about lead and safe alternatives to lead that we probably don't have time to go into tonight. I'll go as far as you want, but I don't wanna monopolize the conversation that way. Are there specifics species locally? Sure, basically loons are the ones that's best documented, but grape blue herons, cormorants, bald eagles, almost every species of waterfowl is documented with lead poisoning. Trying to think of what I've seen. Ducks? Oh, sure. Yeah, not as much as they used to. There used to be a lot more problem with ducks prior to the early 1990s when we required that people who are hunting waterfowl use non-lead shot in their shotguns. That switch over from toxic shot to non-toxic shot has helped ducks a lot. But one of the issues is, and you mentioned this earlier, there's still a lot of the old stuff in the sediments, plus most of the shot used in this country, either in bullets or in shotguns is still lead. The majority of shot used in shotguns isn't used for hunting ducks. It's used for hunting upland game. It's used for, depending on what state you're in, it might be used for hunting morning doves or rails. A tremendous amount isn't used to shoot at animals at all. It's used for the shooting sports, things like skeet and trap. Roughly 25,000 tons of lead goes into the U.S. environment every year from recreational shooting. So, yeah, this is a big problem, you know. That's rather staggering. Well, we can come back to that. Let me see if there's more questions. Yes? Are the samples what? So the question is, are there a lot of loon samples, samples from loons that are in a freezer somewhere or waiting to be analyzed further for other toxins? The short answer is yes. Well, I've got two freezers at the veterinary school at Tufts that contain several thousand samples. Ellen Martinson at University of Vermont has an ultra cold freezer. The loon preservation committee in New Hampshire has a walk-in freezer full of samples and Alec Lindsey's freezer in Northern Michigan State he does all the genetics work on loons. He's the loon continent-wide geneticist. And so we all send Alec samples for population genetics. So, yeah, there are thousands of samples sitting in freezers at the moment. Sounds like we have a good job for students. Absolutely, yeah, before we go on, let me just point out something and then I'll get off the lead topic. But for those people, I'm gonna do a screen share just to show you this. Pardon me. Oh, maybe I don't have to, nevermind. I don't have to do the screen share. I'm gonna get out of that. I'll show it to you with my camera. For those of you who are interested more in hunting and fishing and lead getting into the environment, there is a journal called Ambio. And in September, 2019, we put a special issue out. Neal's Constra from Denmark and Tony Fox and Vernon Thomas were the editors on this. But we put a special issue out the entire September, 2019 issue on lead from hunting and fishing. And so if you want way more detail then most people would care about this. This is a great journal to go to and it's available online. Good, thank you. Yes. Yeah, the journal is possibly funding for our established program. Could you hear that? I could hear most of it. Was that Dick? Asking for information, for feedback on the birds that come from areas as to what the findings are, what the results of these properties are. Sure. Well, I will be totally honest with you, okay? These are necropsy forms waiting to be entered. We have a big online database. It's managed by a fabulous woman named Megan Hartwick where all the data for all the loons that are ever necropsy lives and all the agencies that collaborate in the program, including Maine Inland Fisheries and Wildlife have access to all the data. And so you probably saw the pie chart before that Maine IF&W put together of mortalities of loons in Maine. They've got all the data. What they don't have is they don't have the personnel. We are way behind on data entry. The fact that this is still on paper rather than electronic data entry is embarrassing but this is all volunteer labor. And I think I was on a Zoom call actually yesterday with a couple of people. We're trying to find money to fund a part-time position to do data management on all the loon data from all the New England States for basically forever what I really want. And this is me being an ivory tower idealist. I want all the mortality data from all the loons in North America in the same database. Not only do I have all of the New England data, I've got all the Canadian data and I've got all the Michigan data in files but nobody has time to do anything with it. And I'm supposed to be retired. If I lived to be 104, I might finish this project but yeah, we have to find some more support for this and I'm happy to talk to anybody about digitization and data management and ways to go at this to make it more efficient and to make things more available to people because I understand people's frustrations. I probably call two or three people a week to let them know what we found on their birds but we're doing 150 loon necropsies a year and there isn't anybody designated to do that communication with all the finders and I'm sorry about that. Well, we appreciate what you do I guess is what I can say at this point. Other questions? Yes, I'm sorry, I can't hear you. Has he seen a recent decrease in our general area here or? Decrease in what? In loons? Oh, you're wondering if there has been a, so has there been a noticeable shortening of lifespan of loons in this area or generally and population size? Great question. We can't objectively answer the lifespan question very well because most loons are not banded and no one knows how to age birds. That's a different project, which by the way, we're working on. With some species of birds, you can do some aging by plumage, you can age bald eagles, for instance, up until they get the white head and the white tail at five years of age, but you can't tell a six-year-old bald eagle from a 36-year-old bald eagle, they look the same. Pretty much the same as true with loons. We can tell loons one, two, three, maybe four. Once they get into their adult molt patterns at about five, you can't tell a six-year-old loon from a 36-year-old loon. There is a biochemical technique called a pentosidene isoacet that is currently being worked on that's showing some promise and we're saving samples for that. So I can't tell you about the lifespan thing. The good news on the population end of things, at least in terms of Maine, Vermont, and New Hampshire, is that loon populations seem to be stable or even increasing slightly. This is not true in the Midwest. It's not true in some of the Western states. It's not true in central Canada where the populations are declining. And the consensus is that the states where the loon populations are stable or slightly increasing is the states where there are dedicated nonprofit organizations putting a lot of time into education and management of loons. And so for instance, if you look at Vermont Center for Eco Studies and Eric Hansen is the biologist there or if you look at the Loon Preservation Committee in New Hampshire, in New Hampshire, more than half of all the chicks that are produced in New Hampshire are currently coming off of artificial nest platforms that people are putting out. Which it takes an incredible amount of people power to make happen. And I think what we're seeing is a reflective in management effort. The more education programs there are, the more we're educating anglers and boaters and putting out nest platforms and things, the better the loons are doing. So they can be managed to a certain extent. What we don't know is the effects of some of these climate issues. We're not gonna be able to manage away the rainfall issues or the temperature issues, but at the moment we're holding steady or actually doing better than even in Maine, New Hampshire and Vermont. That's encouraging. Other questions? The question relates to the Midwest loon population. Yeah. And the fact that they are migration is farther than some of our loons from the Northeast where they migrate way to the South by your arrows there. Sure. Is the climate change with challenges of fires and storms and that sort of thing is it felt that maybe that long migration is impacting the Midwest population? Well, this is something where I will share with you information I have from other people. I get out there every once in a while, but when I talk to Kevin Kino in Wisconsin or Walter Piper who works in Wisconsin in Minnesota or Doug Tozier in Canada, there's a couple of things going on. We think one is that water quality is decreasing significantly out there. If you're in a lake association in Maine, many lake associations go out and look at water transparency. They use a sucky disk and they look at dissolved oxygen and they look at introduction of exotic invasive plants and they do a lot to both monitor and try and protect water quality in Maine lakes. The lakes in the Midwest are in much worse shape. They seem to be warming faster. They're having less rainfall. They're having big problems with decreasing clarity of the lake water, partly due to increased recreation and development along the lake edges causing a lot of erosion to take place, partly because of more algal blooms. And I'll tell you I was out in Southern Minnesota working on a loom project a few years ago and I like to be in the water. So I was in the lake with my snorkel and every invasive, scary plant that I had ever read about in the literature was in the lake with me. Things that we would never want to see in Maine, drape aisle, things like that. So they have some big problems out there. And so that's what the breeding habitat. The other issue is the Gulf of Mexico. As you know, they had a huge oil spill down there, the Deepwater Horizon, killed a lot of animals and the chemicals, the PAHs from that talk about organic chemicals are still found in looms that are migrating back and forth to the Midwest. We don't know what effects they might be having. Jim Peruk has actually done some work on that. But the other thing is the Gulf of Mexico is warming very rapidly. And fish populations are going down. We had a situation this path and algal blooms are going up. Think about red tides on the west coast of Florida, the coast of Mississippi, the Galveston area in Texas. Big problems with starving sea turtles, starving seabirds, colonies of gulls and herons and things that are failing because there's not enough food for them. And that's where the looms are wintering. And so I think we've got two threats to these birds in the central part of the continent. One is on the breeding ground, one is on the wintering ground. And Doug Tozier in Canada wrote a fairly scary article on that a couple of years ago, which if you're interested, I could send you a PDF. I'm sure you can find it online, Douglas Tozier, T-O-Z-E-R. Heck of a nice guy. So yeah, the threats are different in different areas. The other thing I should mention, just going back to loon biology, it's an interesting ecological and evolutionary sort of thing. If you look at a loon in Maine, if I go to a lake near you guys, I go out to the Belgrade lakes area and I catch an adult male loon. He's gonna be, if he's healthy, five and a half or six kilograms, he's gonna be 11, 12, 13 pounds. He's gonna be a big bird. If I go to Southern Ontario, Northern Wisconsin, and I catch an adult male loon, he's gonna be six pounds. A healthy, he's gonna be half the mass. But what's interesting about it is he's got bigger wings than our loons here in the Northeast. They're a genetically different population and that has evolved to be better flyers and better migrators. Our birds are big and heavy, but they don't migrate far. You know, it's what, 5,100 miles and they're on the coast and there's food available. If you're in Southern Manitoba and you've got a head 1,800 miles to the Gulf of Mexico, you wanna be smaller, you wanna have bigger wings if you're gonna fly that distance. So we've got genetically separate populations. And again, Alec Lindsey in Michigan has done a lot of that population genetics work. Interesting. We have time for maybe one more. Yes. Now the question is for someone living on a lake where there are loons, aside the obvious things of not introducing lead and voting accidents, what can someone do? And I think this is a great question to be as helpful to the loons on their lake as possible. You know, the nice thing, a nice thing is that many people smarter than I am have addressed that issue. And so there are great resources out there for people interested in loons and for lake associations. And so we could go through a whole list, but what I would, let me recommend a couple of sites for you to go to and look at it. Maine Audubon has a fair amount of information on loons and on loon conservation on their website. Another one is what used to be the Maine Lake Association now called Maine Lakes, the organization that Sue Gallo heads, has a lot of, they have what's called a loon smart program and a lake smart program about how to protect your lakes and how to protect your loons right here in Maine. Excellent information. The Loon Preservation Committee in Moultonboro, New Hampshire probably has one of the finest websites with that kind of information in the world. Easy website to remember, it's loon.org. So I would recommend that you go there and Carolyn Hughes, who's their head of education has put together really good, and not just lists of information, but photographs and videos and things that I think would be extremely helpful, both the individuals and the lake associations that are trying to put together programs to help protect the birds on their lake. Another group in Wisconsin at Northland College up in Ashland is the Sigurd Olson Environmental Institute, S-O-E-I. They're one of the oldest loon protection programs in the country after LPC in New Hampshire. Erica Lemoine runs the program there and again, if you go to the loon site at the Sigurd Olson Institute, it's almost as good as the LPC site they've got a tremendous amount, it's got a very Midwestern focus. So they don't deal with wintering loons at all, they just deal with breeding loons. But I would say Maine Audubon, Maine Lakes, LPC and the Sigurd Olson Institute will give you much better, more accurate, useful information that I can do in five minutes. Good. Any other? Okay. Can you hear that, Mark? No, I heard somebody talking, but yeah. Dianne, who is a professor here and she's saying there's a lot of students in the audience and if there's anyone here who would be interested in working with you, how would they contact you? Or some of your programs? My email was on the first slide, but it's very simple, it's mark.pocrusatuffstud.edu. And I love to encourage students, both undergraduates and graduates and faculty members to get involved in this sort of thing. I guess I'm sort of the Pied Piper of Loon Studies. I try and get academic institutions interested in this. In fact, next Monday I'll be at College of the Atlantic doing a similar talk and meeting with students and faculty there because they've been doing this for a year, they've now been involved in the Loon Necropsy program at College of the Atlantic and also doing Loon Field Studies on Mount Desert Island with Billy Halpern from the Somes-Minell Institute. So I think there's every opportunity to do this and of course your area is neat in that you're relatively close to Augusta where the headquarters for IF&W are and Danielle Daaria is the lead water bird biologist in Maine and Danielle is the one we coordinate all our Loon Studies with. So maybe we could all meet in Augusta and have a meeting and talk about Loon's and talk about what you guys could be doing. Listen up students. I saw one more question. Yes, the what Loon, I didn't catch that. I think I know the answer to that but she's asking if you do see a Loon which needs help, who would you call? I assume in our area we would call Avian Haven. I think you've got a couple of options. One is Avian Haven. The other one is the Warden Service, the IF&W Warden Service. They're very tuned into this. They rescue a lot of Loon's and they also pick up cadavers of dead Loon's. I think currently IF&W has, as I've yesterday, I think 24 dead Loon's for me in their freezer. So the Warden Service can be very helpful in that respect. One thing I would say at the moment, it used to be that we would try and get the public interested in helping Loon's and rescuing Loon's were a little more careful at the moment because of the possible risk of avian influenza. And we don't want people necessarily coming into contact with wild birds unless they know what they're doing and have some basic protective gear. Okay, well, thank you all for coming. I hope to see you in October for lightings. Well, thank you for all your attention and if people wanna get in touch with me, I'd love to talk to you and maybe we can have something taking place on your campus. Who knows? Thank you very much, Mark, for coming. This has been really informative and I think inspirational to a lot of folks here. That's great and Danelle, thanks so much for setting up all the tech. It's getting loud in here, so I'm gonna stop the recording. Okay. Thank you again, we appreciate it. Students your way. Take care, thanks a lot. Bye. Bye-bye.