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Cottage Life

6 ways cottagers can help protect common loons

Photo by Harry Collins Photography/Shutterstock

1. Volunteer to help

Volunteer for the Canadian Lakes Loon Survey at birdscanada.org/loons. Birds Canada will mail you an information package with observation sheets to fill out. Citizen scientists are asked to record loon observations on their lakes at least one day per month for June, July, and August.

2. Naturalize your cottage property

Naturalize your shoreline to provide prime nesting habitat and shelter for small chicks, says Doug Tozer at Birds Canada. Let native brush and tall grasses grow naturally in a buffer along the length of your property’s shoreline. Aim for eight metres (25 feet) depth back from the water’s edge, though smaller buffers help too.

3. Don’t litter

Keep a litter-free yard and secure garbage bins so you don’t attract raccoons and other land-based predators.

4. Don’t rock the boat

When driving boats, keep away from the shoreline to protect loon nests. If you see a loon, slow down and give them space—more than you think. Experts suggest a berth of around 100 m, or several hundred feet. The sound of a boat motor can cause a parent to panic and swim away from its young chicks, the perfect opportunity for a herring gull or raven to swoop in for a meal. Chicks are less adept at diving to escape danger, especially in wakes.

5. Keep your distance

When you’re paddling around the lake, look for signs that a loon is stressed by your presence. The tremolo call may sound like laughter, but it’s actually a distress call. “If you hear that, you should back off,” Tozer says. If a loon swims away from you, you’re getting too close. And if a nesting loon dips its head low and flat in the “hangover” position, it’s also time to back away.

6. Use lead-free fishing tackle

If you fish, use non-toxic, non-lead tackle. Ingesting lead is lethal for loons.

Julia Nunes wrote and directed the one-hour feature documentary, Loons: A Cry From the Mist.

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Loons are being threatened—this is why and how you can help

Photo by Jeremy Hynes

As a documentary filmmaker, I’m often telling stories from far-flung places, but last summer I uncovered one in my own backyard—the lake. Our log cabin looks out on the far end of Smoke Lake in Ontario’s Algonquin Provincial Park. It has a massive deck, perfect for watching the seasons change from spring to summer to fall and for soaking in the quiet. Often, our nearest neighbours are the resident loon pair, who seem to appreciate the isolation as much as we do. At night, they call to each other, a haunting sound that somehow embodies the Canadian outdoor experience. By day, in early summer, they parade their chicks on their backs as if showing them off for us. And by late August, those chicks have grown enough to practise liftoff, flapping their wings in preparation for fall migration.

Over the past few summers, I started noticing things were amiss. The calls were less frequent, the chicks harder to spot from my trusty kayak. Had the loons moved elsewhere? Or were they in trouble? The search for answers ended up becoming an hour-long documentary.

One of the first things I learned is that these majestic but mysterious birds are tricky to study; there are big holes in our understanding of where they go and what they do. “They’re a cryptic species,” says Ken Wright, a wildlife biologist and loon researcher in B.C. “They’re beautiful, amazing birds, and yet there is not much known about them.”

Part of the challenge is their elusive nature—as anyone who’s tried to predict where a diving loon might surface can attest. Also their population is widely dispersed, often in remote areas. “Loons don’t nest where there are lots of people, they fly along the ocean where we’re not really looking, and they aren’t hunted so there are no government-led monitoring programs in place,” says Mark Mallory, an Acadian University professor and a Canada Research Chair. It would take countless hours for researchers to mount a population census. Thankfully, scientists have the help of cottagers, who have easy viewing access from their docks, shorelines, canoes, and kayaks.

How can cottagers help scientists?

For more than four decades, Birds Canada has recruited cottagers to collect data for its annual Canadian Lakes Loon Survey. “One of the big advantages is that you can engage so many volunteers, and you have all these folks all over the place,” says Doug Tozer, the director of waterbirds and wetlands at Birds Canada. “You can monitor so many more lakes than you ever could with paid staff.” Over the years, cottagers and other citizen scientists have kept tabs on more than 4,000 lakes. “People volunteer to make observations of loons and, particularly, how many chicks they produce, and they report it back to us,” says Tozer. “We use that to monitor how healthy loon populations are.”

In 2021, their analysis of all of that collected data started to raise alarm bells.

Across almost all of Canada, common loons—the loon species that breeds the farthest south into cottage country—are struggling to reproduce. Adult populations are stable at about 240,000 breeding pairs, but if they cannot raise enough young to replace themselves, the future of the species is at stake. As Wright puts it: “Just because you see loons on your lake doesn’t mean all is well.”

“We’re right on the doorstep of them producing so few chicks that their populations are going to start to decline,” says Tozer, who co-authored the analysis of decades of data with fellow biologist Kristin Bianchini. “We really identify with loons as being part of Canada, and we’re going to almost lose a part of us, I think, if that happens.”

Common loon productivity (measured by how many chicks a loon pair can raise to six weeks of age) has dropped by an average 1.4 per cent per year nationwide over the past three decades and is now hovering just above the rate at which overall population numbers will start to fall. Declines are steepest in Atlantic Canada, but the downward trend persists in every province except—for reasons unknown—Quebec.

“We are really stymied as to what the mechanisms are behind those declines, and that has me worried,” Tozer says. “There are only so many loon researchers in North America. It’s a small group, so we feel a lot of pressure to figure out what’s going on.”

What hardships are loons facing during breeding season?

To understand the hardships facing loon families, our cameras followed the progress of two pairs of loons over the course of a breeding season, one pair in Wisconsin where similar long-term population studies are underway, and one in Algonquin Park. As we rolled (from a safe distance with long lenses), I found myself both impressed and concerned.

Loon parents face so many challenges in raising their young. They are excellent swimmers but move awkwardly on land, so they nest at the water’s edge where they can slip into the lake at the first sign of danger. The location leaves their eggs vulnerable to raccoons, otters, and other shoreline predators. The adults must maintain a gruelling, constant vigilance throughout the four-week incubation period. Nests can be washed out by motor boat wakes or sudden heavy rainfalls that drown the eggs if left unattended. As shorelines are developed, the number of prime nest sites shrinks, and rival intruder loons will sometimes attack, even kill, resident loons to take over a territory.

Once the eggs hatch, the workload only increases. Chicks enter the water within hours and stay on the same lake until they learn to fly in the fall—if they survive that long. Life on the open water leaves them vulnerable to predation from above in the form of birds of prey, so they need around-the-clock parental protection. Unlike adult loons, which are strong enough and have sharp enough beaks to fight off an eagle swooping down for a quick meal, chicks need help to stay alive.

Chicks also require a steady supply of fish to eat, all of it coming from a single lake. The faster they grow, the more likely they are to avoid predation. In the first several weeks, parents must do all the hunting: diving, catching, surfacing, feeding the chicks and themselves, then starting over again. Loon families require lakes with lots of fish and clear enough water to find them; two parents with two chicks can consume up to a half-ton of fish in a single season.

“You watch a loon family out on a lake and it looks really easy right? But there’s a lot that can go wrong if you’re a chick,” Tozer says. “You can starve, you can have inclement weather, you can get separated from your parents by a motorboat and then something eats you.” Since loon parents hatch only one or two young per season, every chick loss is significant.

And yet, common loons have persevered for eons. They are one of the oldest living bird species on earth, dating back 70 million years. Why are they struggling now? The biologists I spoke to, both in Canada and parts of the northern United States where similar declines have been observed, agree that human-induced environmental changes are likely at the root. And that’s what worries them most.

“Common loons winter off our coasts. They summer in our backyards at cottages, so they are very vulnerable to human activity,” says Wright. “They are showing us what the health of our lakes is.”

What are the major inhibitors to common loon reproduction?

It will take years’ more study to know for sure, but researchers have three major concerns about the lake water that loons inhabit. Mercury—a pollutant released from the burning of fossil fuels—is found in many lakes across Canada, and is a neurotoxin that makes loon parents lethargic, less able to care for their young.

Second, acid rain that fell decades ago has killed off fish stocks that have yet to fully rebound in some areas. “Loons need lots of big, nutritious organisms, in the form of fish, to survive. But those are exactly the things that got knocked out of these lakes by acid rain,” says Mark Mallory, who has studied the effects of lake acidification on loons in the Sudbury, Ont. area. Recent research shows that, even after acidity has dropped in some lakes, the loons have not returned. “Nature is very resilient, and it may take a long time for things to decline,” says Mallory. “And correspondingly, it can take a long time for things to recover.”

The third main concern is climate change. To see a nesting loon panting in the heat, beak open and breathing heavily, is heartbreaking. But biologists who study loons believe that the effects are far more insidious: among other outcomes, warming waters cause an increase in methylmercury levels and cause bacteria to be more active. As Tozer says, “Climate change is going to be the big ugly thing in the background that’s causing a lot of this change.”

Loons are especially vulnerable to environmental change because they return to the same lake where they’ve laid eggs in the past, even if conditions are deteriorating. “This is hard-wired into their genetics,” Mallory explains. “They keep trying because they’ve defended the territory and they think everything else looks good about this site.”

The loon pair our cameras followed last summer in Algonquin were able to navigate the breeding season’s many challenges and raise two healthy chicks. Sitting in an edit suite watching the parents brave swarms of blackflies to stay on a nest or delicately manoeuvre their long beaks to carefully rotate an egg was awe-inspiring. To see them underwater, turning on a dime to catch a yellow perch, is to witness them at the peak of their powers. Both chicks grew at an astonishing rate—from tiny fluff balls to juveniles almost the size of their parents. It felt like a victory despite the larger question marks about the survival of the species.

In late fall, long after we close up our cabin each year, the young loons are left to fend for themselves. Their parents migrate first, leaving them alone on the frigid waters for several weeks. They feed and grow, building strength until just before the ice comes in. Then they too take flight, on their maiden journey south, as instinct guides them to do.

I only hope it continues for generations to come. For the loons’ sake and for ours.

Julia Nunes wrote and directed the one-hour feature documentary, Loons: A Cry From the Mist.

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Cottage Q&A: Seagulls fighting loons

By Petr Simon/Shutterstock

Last October, I was out on our dock when I noticed three seagulls, one flying and shrieking, and two others harassing two loons in the water. Every time they dove, the seagulls would do a flap-jump type of lift and then settle beside the loons when they emerged. I have never seen this before. Were they fighting over the same food?—Trudy O’Brien, Lake Newboro, Ont.

Bingo! Well, probably bingo. “This sounds like a feeding issue of some sort,” says Kathy Jones, the volunteer manager of the Birds Canada Canadian Lakes Loon Survey. “Both species eat fish.” Beyond that, “I can’t say for sure what was happening,” she says. “Perhaps the loons were on a particularly good raft of fish and the gulls wanted to use it? Perhaps the loons had wandered into the gull’s feeding territory? Perhaps both species were fishing on their own, but loons and gulls just don’t do well in the same space?” 

Cottage Q&A: Loons attacking ducks

Maybe, except, “I would think gulls fishing on their own are more efficient than them trying to steal food from loons,” says Jones. Loons scarf. A loon could probably easily gobble down a catch before a gull could snatch it away. Then again, gulls are known for stealing food from other gulls, from other birds, even from people. (Try eating French fries on a beach filled with gulls.)

This article was originally published in the September/October 2022 issue of Cottage Life.

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Cottage Life

Canadian results from the 2022 State of the World’s Birds report

By Danita Delimont/Shutterstock

BirdLife International recently released its “State of the World’s Birds” report and it doesn’t look good for our feathered friends. Although conservation efforts have been attributed to the rebound of waterfowl and wetland birds like geese and ducks to the tune of about 150 per cent since the 1970s, overall, half of the world’s bird species are in decline, with one in eight facing extinction.

Birds Canada has been contributing vital data to the report, published every four years, and the information could ultimately save our birds.

“People feel like they can’t make a difference… and they can,” says Andrew Couturier, the senior director for landscape science and conservation with Birds Canada.

Canada also publishes our own “State of Canada’s Birds” report, most recently in 2019, which dials down our domestic bird issues, taking into consideration Canada can’t claim exclusive title to many birds, given their migration to other areas to winter or breed. An amazing 66 per cent of the trends concluded in the report came from volunteer citizen scientists, who populated data for breeding bird atlases, the Christmas Bird Count and eBird Canada checklists. In a world where information is power, it’s the monitoring of the numbers that informs the identification of threats, and where action would be most beneficial. Specifically, the establishment of Important Bird and Biodiversity Areas (IBAs), key spots where birds may breed, feed, winter or gather while migrating, are designated with this species and location specific information.

8 ways to help birds during the fall migration

Those IBAs consider the needs of, and risks to, bird species, according to their specific habits. For instance, birds reliant on Canada’s native grasslands have declined a dramatic 87 per cent since 1970. The biggest reason? The increase in crop agriculture. But what volunteer led data showed was that cattle farmers may provide a solution, at least for some species. “Due to the conversion to agriculture in their breeding grounds, there’s hardly any habitat left. But now we have budding relationships with cattle ranchers, whose pastures mimic grassland habitat,” says Couturier. “When ranching is done properly, there’s a high diversity of other creatures as well.”

Hurricane Fiona’s devastation to Nova Scotia, P.E.I., and Newfoundland, whose intensity may be attributed to climate change, could be an example of what Canada’s shorebirds and seabirds are facing. Canada’s bird report states our shorebirds have declined by 40 per cent, but seabirds have been devastated with 55 of 58 species now of conservation concern. Couturier worries that Fiona may have destroyed vital habitat. “Our shorebirds aren’t there now, but when they come back, they may have no beach to breed on.” Monitoring birds that historically bred in these areas will be especially vital in the next few years.

Excepting species like the evening grosbeak that depend on the seeds and fruit of Canada’s mature forests (forest crop specialists have declined by 39 per cent), the rest of the 20 per cent of forest birds that stay in Canada during the winter have increased by 34 per cent. Unfortunately, those that migrate to South America have declined by 31 per cent. One of the actions Couturier recommends for those that migrate is buying bird friendly coffee. “Most coffee is from clear-cuts.” For birds who winter here, Canadians can advocate to save our mature trees and forests, limit pesticide use, and help to establish IBAs and networks of protected areas.

Help winter wildlife with tips from Hope for Wildlife

Pesticide use is also a big factor in the world’s reduction of insects, including pollinators. Birds like nighthawks, barn swallows, and bluebirds that feed by catching insects while flying, all once so plentiful their names included the words “common”, have decreased in numbers in Canada by 59 per cent since the 1980s. The signal this depletion sends is as relevant to humans as when coal miners used canaries.

But Couturier still believes that since we’ve turned the tide for endangered birds before, we can again, especially since data informs us now of where best to focus are efforts via the IBA’s. “If we make the case to landowners that have been doing something right or special…we’ll be helping landowners to steward. There are so many people that practice bird feeding, that are clearly interested in birds, but only a small proportion join in the programs.”

The IBAs have been so successful, they inspired KBAs, or Key Biodiversity Areas that encompass all forms of biodiversity. “We always knew that IBAs were bigger than birds,” says Couturier.

It’s hard to argue with the facts. According to the “State of the World’s Birds” report, between 21 and 32 bird species would have gone extinct sometime between 1993 and now, if it hadn’t been for conservation efforts.

The rebound of waterfowl and wetland birds, and the increase of about 110 per cent of birds of prey such as bald eagles and ospreys, are also greatly accredited to data led investment in conservation and cooperative stewardship of their habitats.

Why bald eagle populations have bounced back

Canada’s federal government is among many that has set a goal to protect 30 per cent of land and seas by 2030, and are increasingly using Important Bird and Biodiversity Areas and the newer KBA designation to target the areas that will get the best results. According to Couturier, as of now about 17 per cent of that target has been met.

If we put the same amount of effort into saving our shore, grassland, and aerial insectivore birds, as we did with waterfowl, wetland, and birds of prey, what could we accomplish?