2020 LoonCam News2019 LoonCam NewsTab 3Tab 4
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The Loons Get Down to Business

The high water level doesn’t seem to be slowing this pair down. They’ve been working on building up last year’s nest mound and by this morning the mound broke the surface of the water. And then they wasted no time, mating at 8:46 am. This will likely go on for a week or so before the first egg is laid. By then, the pair should have a high and dry, well-formed nest bowl to receive the egg.

You may notice that some taller saplings have been added around the nest. This is our effort to supply a “natural” cover to act as avian avian predator guard. Last year, the one and only chick to hatch from this nest was taken by an eagle just hours after hatching. We would rather not have a repeat this year.

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Nest Building Started, Network Problems Persist

What a difference a day makes.  While the camera was having trouble this week, the loons were busy nest building.  Thursday morning, there was a mud pile where there used to be only water, and the loons were mating around 8:45.  We’re still having network reliability issues, but have been assured by the cable company that they will try to fix them.

Mud Nest

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LPC Loon Cam 2020 is Live

On Monday, May 3’rd, looncam 2020 went live.  We are still in testing mode, but already we’ve seen the loon pair stop by so want others to enjoy the occasional spotting.  The pond level is very high, so they will have to build their up nest with pond-bottom, something they have already started to do.  It will likely take a few weeks.

Over the next day or two, we hope to move the camera from on-shore to in the pond, move the mic near the next area and hope to get our bandwidth problems fixed.

Our network problems are severe.  We’ve had two visits from the “cable guy”, but after 8 hours of work, not improvement.  The problem is upstream from the pole.  Hopefully the issue has been escalated to the right people to get it fixed.  Their last words were, “give us until Friday.”.  ugh!

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Loon Cam 2 Second Egg Laid!

At 8:40 this morning, the Loon Cam 2 female laid the second egg, about 61 hours after the first egg. That’s a longer than average time span between eggs and, considering that the first egg was getting almost constant incubation for the last 36 hours or so, the first chick to hatch should have a significant developmental advantage over the second chick.

You may recall that last year this pair’s dominant chick severely persecuted it’s younger sibling, eventually resulting in the second chick’s death. Will we have a rerun of last year’s outcome? That will likely be a major topic of conversation on the YouTube chat. But keep in mind that it’s more than just the age difference between chicks that that governs sibling rivalry. Individual personalities are also a factor. We won’t know exactly how these chicks will behave until they hatch.

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Changing of the Guard

It was a rainy nest swap at 7:10 this morning. Dad had done the night shift, which is a little out of the ordinary for this pair but nothing to worry about.

On average, female loons tend to do more of the night-time incubating. This might be due to an advantage of having the larger loon on patrol during the night or, in this case, it might be because older female loons are less tolerant of the biting insects out during daylight hours.

There doesn’t appear to be any universal nest swap schedule for loons. Some pairs seem to swap every three to five hours while others, such as this pair, prefer to do much longer shifts.

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Loon Ages: What do we really know?

If you read the posts of the chatters on YouTube, you may see a discussion about how the female is “26 years old” or “much older than the male.” So how do we know that? The answer is we don’t know. What the chatters are doing is taking an estimated minimum age and considering it to be the true age. More than likely, that is not the case.
The female on this territory was banded as an adult in 1998. The male was banded as an adult in 2014. So we can do the math and calculate that the female has been around for at least 21 years and the male for at least 5 years.
And we can adjust for what we know about the general life history of loons. After hatching and spending the summer on it’s natal lake, a young loon will fly to the ocean and remain there until near the end of its third year, when it will finally molt into an adult plumage and fly to the lakes of New Hampshire, looking for a productive territory it can move into. Since these two loons were banded as adults, we can add three years and calculate an absolute minimum age: 24 for the female and 8 for the male.
We also know that it’s not easy for a young loon to get a territory. Most times, the loon needs to fight to get it. And then there’s a learning curve to mating and nesting. The more experienced loons are more likely to nest and hatch chicks. So the rule of thumb is that by the time a young loon manages to get on a territory and actually hatch a chick or two, it will be five or six years old. So the chances are good that the female is at least 26 and the male is at least 10.
But is the female really older than the male? We have no way of knowing. Seeing that the female is approaching the maximum known age for a common loon (early thirties) statistical theory would say she is probably older than the male. But that’s what we are dealing with: maybe and probably.
Every now and then, we get a chance to capture a chick that is large enough band. We call them HY (hatch year) loons. For those loons and only those loons we can assign an exact age. HY banded loons are extremely valuable because we get to track them for their entire lifetime and we can learn more about dispersal behavior. But to fit a band to a chick it needs to be at least a couple of months old so that we’re sure the band won’t constrict the leg as the loon grows. But to catch a two or three month old loon is not an easy task. We take them as we can get them.
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