In New Hampshire: Looking Out for the Loons

By Gregory Jaynes

The ancient and bruised Boston Whaler was coughing across one of the prettiest lakes in New Hampshire -Squam Lake, called Golden Pond in Henry Fonda's last picture -when a loon swam out of a birch-lined cove. "It has a chick, said Jeff Fair, slowing the boat and putting the glasses on the bird. "No, two chicks. One is riding on the adult's back." To Janis Minor, sitting in the bow, Jeff said, "You've got your work cut out. Go around and warn the homeowners."

Jeff is director of the Loon Preservation Committee of New Hampshire. Janis, who had checked the nest in this cove just an hour earlier, is a summer fieldworker. "They must have just been hatched," she said.

"They're hugging the shore line," said Jeff. "I think they've just come off the nest. Let's give them some peace." He idled the engine down while the loons swam around a point and out of sight. Just after the young are hatched, loons move operations from the nest to a brooding area. With the family removed, Fair and Minor crept slowly into the cove to inspect the floating nest, a nest the preservation committee had set out in the spring. It is more raft than nest, actually about 6 ft. square, framed with cedar logs, filled with sod and sedge. Loons nest naturally on land, where raccoons feast on loon eggs. Preservation committee = artificial floating nests = more loons.

Janis fished some sandwich bags from her pack, and Jeff began collecting pieces of eggshell, olive brown flecked with mocha spots, membrane gooey on the white inside. Somebody with a micrometer would check the specimens for thickness. In the days of DDT, the shells thinned dangerously, though not fatally. In the days of acid rain, one worries -without evidence, so far -that the shells might thin again.

Suddenly there came a cry from off the lake. "Uh-oh," said Jeff. "We may have beat the old man to the nest. He doesn't know what's happened."

"I feel so bad," said Janis. "The bird sounds so distraught."

The thing dived, surfaced closer to the Whaler, gave a cry as if it were about to take flight on the sorry wings of its despair. "This is something I never thought about," said Jeff, "disturbing the bird like this. She should answer back, but she's not, because she's protecting the chicks."

"I've never heard that kind of hooting before," said Janis.

"Let's go," said Jeff. And they did.

They call themselves the loon rangers. They have counterparts in north-country states from Maine to Wisconsin. In New Hampshire in 1979, the three-year-old Loon Preservation Committee found that only 39 lakes were being used by nesting loons, a decrease of 50% over 50 years. The population had dropped from thousands to a few hundred. The reasons were people, crowding, motorboats, Jet Skis. In the past five years, through the efforts of people like Fair, who earned his master's degree in wildlife biology before signing on as director of the committee in 1981, and Minor, who would now warn all the nearby homeowners that loons with chicks were here, so go slow, the population has been stabilized. It is still listed as threatened, however.

The object of this concern has a history going back to the Paleocene epoch, before the saber-toothed tiger. Cree Indians called the bird mookwa, or spirit of northern waters. Ojibways called it mang, or the most handsome of birds. Crees heard its call as the anguish of a dead warrior denied entry to heaven. Chipewyans believed the cry was an omen of death. Norman and Ethel Thayer in On Golden Pond simply believed that the bird was welcoming them to their summer cottage and saying goodbye in the autumn. It is the Thayers of New England that Fair is trying to educate.

"One sign of our success is that we get chased out of a lot of areas," Jeff was saying one recent lovely day, chugging across Squam. On the shore grew black-eyed Susans and Queen Anne's lace. Raccoons came down for a drink. "People wave us off. They yell, 'There are loons in the area!' and I say, 'Yeah, I know. I work for them.' "

Jeff says there are three reasons why loons should be protected. "First, there is the biological argument: they are part of the ecosystem. Second, they are a litmus, a barometer; if they're gone, something is wrong. Third, they sound so neat at night."

Fair's sense of what is aesthetically correct comes into play when he talks of winters in northern New Hampshire after the summer crowds have gone. Too, he has a restless desire to move farther and farther north, as if he were just trying to get far enough ahead to get out of the way. "Whoever turned the first tire inside out, painted it white and used it for a planter," he grumbles, for example, "that guy ought to be shot." To each new recruit, he gives a copy of Edward Abbey's The Monkey Wrench Gang, a book about an engaging lot of good-hearted but anarchic-minded souls who would not picket an environmentally displeasing project so much as they would blow it up. "I like a little extremism once in a while," he says.

And yet the last time some ignorant out-of-state canoeists snatched a loon egg from its nest, took it to the marina on Squam Lake, along the way allowing it to cool enough to die, asked the marina operator what kind of turtle egg it was, were told, "My God, that's a loon egg!" and left the thing and fled, Fair did not pursue them with a vengeance. He tracked them down and explained the significance of what they had done. "I can't prosecute ignorance," he says. "I'm here to educate."

The fine for messing with loons can go as high as $1,000 or a year in jail, or both, but Fair does not remember the maximum ever being imposed. Not long ago, a man shot one, thinking it was a merganser. Grieved when he discovered it was not, he took the carcass straightaway to the nearest fish-and-game officer and confessed. The man was so honest, so contrite, the officer let him go.

Not everyone in these parts is so considerate of wildlife. Riding down the back roads with Fair, one comes across some wounds. "Beavers used to live over there," the loon ranger says, pointing. "People would come out and kick the dams apart to let their children see the beavers rebuild." The beavers put up with this, Fair explains, until the surrounding population reached 250 families, and then the beavers took a powder.

At lunch in a remote village, a man named Ralph comes over to chide Fair. Ralph is a heavy contributor to the loon committee. "We had a loon around the dock yesterday," Ralph says. "I tried to hit it with a canoe paddle, but it got away."

"Yeah," says Jeff, "they're pretty fast." Later he allows, "You can't let the loon jokes bother you.";

The birds themselves are funny though. John McPhee observed that a loon's "maximum air speed is 60 miles an hour, and his stall-out speed must be 59. Anyway, he scarcely slows up, apparently because he thinks he will fall." Big fat feet out behind them, they crash-land on their bellies, an avian comedy. On land, they flop along on their stomachs. When it rains, they mistake highways for lakes, come down like thunderbolts. People are always tending their abrasions and taking them back to ponds. To take off, they need as much as a quarter-mile of liquid runway, and no one can watch the spectacle without praying Godspeed -they have to try so hard. They are an aeronautical nightmare, a nautical dream -they are faster than fish, which they eat. Grown, they weigh up to 9 Ibs. They sleep in the water. The only adjective that fits their call is haunting.

Soon the loons of the north country will begin to change color. All summer they have been got up gorgeously, like pool-hall hustlers. The back, a tessellation of white speckles on a canvas of black, will turn gray-brown. The jet-black head and bill will go dull gray, pale white. The neckbands -brilliant, symmetrical hash marks -will disappear. And so will the loons. Put a telescope on the beaches of North Carolina, or Florida, aim it out to the three-mile marker, near the sea lanes, and there the loons will be, riding the water low.