We're all a little Looney

Just this past weekend Cory and I visited Bald Eagle Lake in Minnesota following a lead, that we may be able to spot a Common Loon there. We were told that Loons tend to stick to the middle of the lake and that they are best spotted from a boat.

Cory recently purchased an inflatable kayak from a local Minnesota company, Paddle North. Due to several weeks of shipping delays due to the pandemic, this was the first weekend we have actually had the kayak in our possession. For months Cory has been moping and complaining, "look at those people showing off their kayak," or, "well if I had a kayak, we could do this or we could do that," etc. It was really getting annoying. Well now we finally had the kayak and Cory was determined to get out on the water. Cory wanted to go to some far flung destination in the north of Minnesota where wildlife viewing is supposed to be great or to Lake Superior, and while that would have been great, I managed to talk him into trying it out for the first time on a lake closer to home. I told him we should make sure it works correctly and we need to get our waterborne wildlife viewing gear in order first.

I have not always been comfortable around the water and I am even less comfortable when considering which of my beloved cameras to use while on the water. I decided that for our very first paddle in our tandem kayak, that I would bring my waterproof point and shoot camera, Nikon 1 AW1. This camera is ok, it has changeable lenses, but the quality of the images captured in this camera, pales in comparison to my other camera set-ups. The kayak performed great and we had a great day on the water. We did in fact spot a couple of Loons on the lake. The Nikon 1 AW1 did ok. This image of the Loon skipping across the water is the best image I captured with it. To be honest though, I wish I had one of my other cameras, because the following day, when we went back out on the same lake, the Loons were less animated.

When we got back out on the lake, I did have one of my better cameras, I now trusted the kayak and I more or less trusted that Cory would not intentionally tip us over into the lake for fun. We were able to relocate the two Loons we had spotted, and realized that we had missed something the previous day, these two had a chick. More of a juvenile really. It is possible that the reason they were so animated the previous day, is they may have felt that we were too close to their chick, but honestly we didn't see it, and we would have backed off a bit we had.

We were still able to get pretty close though. We were able to see the Loons dive into the water in search of food, stretch there wings, call to their chicks, call warnings when we edged a little too close, and we could see the changing sheen of their neck feathers, dependent on how the sunlight hit them. You can see the sheen on the neck feathers at the top of this post. In certain light the color of the neck feathers range from purple, to turquoise, to a blue-green. As the Loons were calling, we heard replies in the distance and decided we would head north west on the lake, generally the sound of the replying Loons and try to find them. After about 20 minutes or so we spotted them, two Loons together near the eastern bank of the northwest neck of the lake. After about 30 minutes of photographing them, one of the Loons began wading, diving and swimming further west, almost to the western edge of the lake. And then we heard it, long eery wailing calls from the Loon. It was very strange, at first we weren't even sure it was the Loon, it sounded kind of like what I imagine a wounded coyote would sound like. Then we saw it, a juvenile Loon answering its parent's call. I say parent, because the male and female Loons are so similar, its hard to distinguish between the two. We had found another family.

Cory and I would read later that the Common Loon migrates inland to the norther lakes regions for nesting, and winters along both the Atlantic and Pacific coasts. On the Atlantic coast, from New Foundland to Florida, on the Pacific Coast from Alaska to Mexico. We find this kind of strange, because we grew up in Virginia and lived in California, and these were the first Loons of any kind we have seen. At least we are pretty sure. The only Loons we had seen before this was on Canadian bank notes and coins. We enjoyed watching and photographing the State Bird of Minnesota, though I think their name is a misnomer, at least in our experience they are not very common.

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