Call of the Wild: Loons
Wood marshaled longtime summer residents around the lake to adopt loons in particular coves or bays. Feeling connected to “their” loons, people gave money to Wood’s organization. They put up signs and formed floating armadas to protect newly hatched chicks on busy weekends.
Drawing on the data collected by the new organization, the state of New Hampshire added the common loon to its list of threatened species in 1979.
Wood’s Mercedes, sporting a LOONS license plate, became a familiar sight around the lake. His summer place was located near the spot where film crews shot On Golden Pond, which opens with Katharine Hepburn’s quavering call to Henry Fonda, playing her irascible husband: “Norman … the loons! The loons! They’re welcoming us back.” In the movie, loons serve as metaphors for home and family, what we hold onto, what slips away. (“I don’t hear a thing,” grumbles Norman.) After the film’s release, a Wall Street Journal reporter noted the growing association of loons with exclusivity and access to unspoiled places like Squam. Loons, he wrote, had become “a totem to the wealthy.”
Field biologists returned every year to Squam and other lakes in New Hampshire. Gradually, counts ticked upward. The data they collected, by 2010 spanning 35 years, became the most extensive ever assembled on loons.
The research expanded beyond Squam and beyond New Hampshire. In 1987, Wood and his biologists began working with a young veterinarian at Tufts, Mark Pokras. Pokras sliced open the stomach of the first dead loon LPC sent him and found fishing tackle lodged there. The steel hook could have disintegrated over time, but the sinker, made of soft lead, had poisoned the bird.
Pokras began keeping his own records, which would grow to more than 1,500 loon necropsies. Of the adults that came to him off the summer breeding grounds, lead had killed half.
Wood and the committee took their findings to the state. After years of being lobbied, in 2000 New Hampshire’s legislature banned the sale and use of lead sinkers weighing one ounce or less and jigs under one inch. The law was the first in the nation to restrict lead fishing gear.
In time, mining decades of data, loon biologists developed a single number for indexing population stability: the ratio of surviving chicks to territorial pairs. A ratio of 0.48 meant that a population on a given lake, or in a given region, was stable. A higher number signaled an expanding population; a lower number warned of a population in decline.
Entering the new century, Squam’s loon population appeared healthy. Across New Hampshire, the number of nesting loon pairs had tripled. Only once in 25 years had the statewide breeding ratio dipped significantly below the magic 0.48 indicator. The Loon Preservation Committee had shown that it was possible to reverse the decline of a threatened species.
The success of LPC’s model was startlingly clear across the Connecticut River, where the Vermont Loon Recovery Project took citizen science to new levels. Eric Hanson, the project’s lone biologist, mobilized a volunteer army that exceeded the number of lakes in the state–about 100–considered suitable for loons. More rafts, more float lines protecting nest sites, and more lake-association meetings translated into breeding success. In 1983, only seven pairs of loons had nested in the entire state; by 2005, the year Vermont removed loons from its endangered-species list, 53 nesting pairs had produced 57 surviving chicks. The following year, when a recent state ban on the sale of half-ounce lead sinkers took effect, the number of adult loons in Vermont passed 200.