"The Spirit of the Northern Waters": The Common Loon
The common loon is arguably the most iconic wildlife of the Adirondack park. Some see it as a "symbol of unspoiled wilderness," many seek to capture its elegant beauty in photographs or paintings, others enjoy spinning bird-related puns from its name. I personally love every loon sighting I experience. Their tendency to appear and disappear on the surface of a lake seemingly out of nowhere comes from their graceful dives to find food deep in the lake, but to the observer can give a distinctly ghostly impression. Finding a loon in your line of sight is thrilling, and you automatically both try not to blink and not to breathe, hoping to catch a few notes of its haunting call before it notices you and disappears again. Yes, it really is that beautiful. See for yourself:
The loon's call is a conversation, a cry across its lake to its mate. And, as if we needed another reason to find their calls beautiful, loons are believed to mate for life. In my experience, loons can call back and forth to each other for a long time, overlapping their echoing cries in an eerie harmony for several minutes. I have often awoken to hear this late at night or early in the morning, which, despite its beauty, is the only occasion where I find the loons' cries to be more plaintively annoying than mournfully beautiful.
While loons can be found singing their haunting love songs elsewhere in the US's northernmost states and Canada, in New York State the loon is found almost exclusively within the blue line, with a smaller population in the St. Lawrence river valley.
Love for these enigmatic waterfowl as well as an acknowledgement of the hazards to them posed by acid rain, disease, and development has resulted in a dedicated effort for the preservation of the Adirondack loon population. The Wildlife Conservation Society conducts a yearly Adirondack Loon Census to monitor the population. On the third Saturday of July, hundreds of volunteers (including my loon-loving father) head to over 200 lakes around the park, where they record information about any loons they observe in an hour spent on the lake. The censuses of the last 10 years have demonstrated a relatively stable population of 2,000 loons in the Adirondacks.
No comments:
Post a Comment