Loons put love on hold to fly solo for the winter
This winter, the Citizen’s Tom Spears looks at what makes our coldest season tick. It’s a series we call The Science of Winter, and today we catch up with the loons, whose turbulent family lives provided story after story in our recent Science of Summer. Have they settled down quietly? Not a chance.
The loon couples that seemed devoted and inseparable all summer have just done a Brad and Angelina. She’s spending winter in Mississippi or Florida while he may be somewhere in Virginia. But they’ll reconcile in the spring, driven not so much by romance as by desire to maintain territory.
For the moment, the two might not even recognize each other if they met. Gone is the glamorous black and white of summer; they’re in dull grey, and alone.
“Males and females migrate to the wintering ground singly and winter solitarily,” says biologist Walter Piper of Chapman University, who has spent decades watching loons in Wisconsin.
“Almost all of the loons that we see in the wintertime are loners, although we occasionally do see small groups that form for short periods of time. We have no evidence that the loons that meet each other during winter on the Atlantic or the Gulf of Mexico are anything but unrelated individuals that breed far apart.”
In spring, established pairs will return separately to their old breeding grounds, where they will start making nests and laying green eggs all over again. But there are sometimes sporadic encounters after the initial split at fall migration time, Piper has found. Late this fall, after the loons had gone their separate ways, photographer Linda Grenzer recorded one pair meeting up again on their home lake. As with Pitt and Jolie, the unexpected encounter had its awkward moments, which Piper records in his group’s remarkable and extensive loon blog:
“Clune and Honey (Linda’s names for the banded pair) were a bit wary of each other at first,” he writes. “This shyness should not be surprising, as they have both lost their breeding plumage and donned winter attire.
“According to Linda, though, they rather quickly recognized each other and paddled off contentedly together. Apparently after six years of being together, and rearing of 10 chicks to fledging, familiarity with your partner involves more than just feathers!
“We have very poor information on the behaviour of territorial loons in the fall, so we can only speculate about what it means.
“As a behavioural ecologist, I am inclined to interpret such meetings as more calculating than romantic. I cannot resist the temptation to view such a meeting as a final patrol of this precious breeding lake by its owners to ensure that no intruders have tried to put down roots in hopes of claiming (Lake) Muskellunge in 2017.
“To any such pretenders, the presence of a tight pair late in the fall would signal that the territory was not available without a costly battle. But that is just speculation.”
This year’s youngsters, meanwhile, have left home for good. Unlike Brad and Angelina, loons don’t worry much about custody.