loon chick

Showing posts with label loon chick. Show all posts

Toasted

Friday, July 15, 2011

We have a heat index warming today that the index may reach 110 today. That's less than great news for this gal who'd prefer to have summer highs between 65 and 70 degrees, especially since I'm already feeling a little toasted.

There's no reason to subject you to photos of my sunburn, but I can assure you that despite quite liberal sunscreen application on Wednesday, there are certain strips of skin -- my forearms and a patch above my back waistline -- that are lovely shades of painful fluorescent. Nothing I can do now but keep the aloe vera close at hand. The burns' sting seem to have diminished significantly overnight and I'm hoping that means I'll feel a little more with it today. It always amazes me just how much a day in the full sun can take out of you. Mix a full day of sun with a sense of being overwhelmed by laundry, articles, and various other obligations and Wednesday evening was one cranky, emotional mess.

Still, the pre-toasted part of the day was pretty darn nice. Andy and I headed down the lake for a day's paddle. I think the high temp was somewhere in the low 70s: no absurdly high heat indexes here! At least not yet . . .

We found our first loon chicks of the year, just as we were turning the corner into the Boundary Waters.

Twins!

Another feathered friend followed us for a while once we reached the far end of the lake and started heading up the river that connects the lake we live on to the next lake.

This little duck (she didn't even have full wings yet) stayed close by the entire time we were on the river, even when we made a lengthy stop halfway upstream to do some catch and release fishing. There were a ton of hungry bass hanging out in the river, just waiting to grab our night crawlers.

After the fish had several bites of yummy worm and we'd had a bite of lunch ourselves (not of yummy worm), we headed on to the next lake. Why both portaging when you can just press on upstream through the river?

The sunburn no doubt happened on our return trip to the cabin. Turns out SPF 45 just doesn't hold for six hours and several miles of paddling. As the French would say: "Eh bien." Something tells me that as the temperature soars these next few days, I'll soon be wishing I was back in the river, feeling the cool current tug and swirl around my ankles.

Nature is Not Always Nice

Tuesday, June 7, 2011

When you live in the woods, it grows easy to assume the wild animals are part of our extended family. Just take Al the pine marten for example. He (or she, for all I know) was nothing more than a nuisance who spent the winter days getting into the bird seed, garbage, and compost. Despite his mostly destructive nature, we gave him a name, imposed a personality on him, and acted like he was a friend. Although we never (intentionally) feed him, our relationship with him smacked of faux familiarity, pretending he was the wildest of pets.

When you live in a place where your path commonly crosses with that of bears, moose, foxes, and other critters it's easy to forget that we're the ones tangled in their webs of existence, not the other way around. We're the ones imposing on their world and we're meant to be casual observers.

The first week of May, a nesting platform for loons was set up in the bay outside of work. A week ago Thursday, a loon climbed up on nest and stayed. Within the first two days, it became clear a loon couple had laid two eggs in the nest. "Hot damn," we thought. "We're going to have a loon chick sometime during the last week of Jue."

But on Sunday, as I sat at my desk, I heard a terrible scream. At first I thought the loon was bothered by the moose I'd just seen swimming in the bay, but there was something about the heart-wrenching nature of the scream that made me think the loon was in true trouble. When I made it out on to the porch to get a view of the nest, I saw an eagle sitting in a gnarly jack pine about twenty feet from the nest. In the distance, another eagle soared in the sky. The loon, probably driven off the nest by the pesky black flies, was swimming near the nest, calling out in distress.

The eagle in the tree swooped down towards the nest and the loon raised up on its back quarters to protest until the eagle returned to his perch. But the second time the eagle swooped down, he seemed to catch something in his talon which fell in a spray into the lake.

I hoped I hadn't seen what I suspected I had, but yesterday morning when I arrived at work and saw no loon on the nest I knew it was true; the eagle had destroyed both of the loons' eggs.

Although the loons no longer had eggs to incubate, they visited the nest a couple times yesterday. They swam around the nest, climbing on top of the floating platform and softly cooing in some sort of heartbreaking loon conversation. It's early in the season and loons will likely use the nest to lay another egg. But it's still no fun to watch and it's easy to feel angry at the eagle who didn't even get a tasty snack out of his raid.

It all goes to show that we can't assume wild animals live some Disney-fied cartoon existence. Every animal is fighting hard for its survival. It's not all wildflowers and butterflies and happy little fawns with Bambi eyes. The critters of the forest play by a whole different rulebook than us humans, one that can horrify us and that can be difficult to justify. But, whether we like it or not, it's a dog-eat-dog (or eagle-eat-loon egg) world out there and nature is not always nice and we're in no position to interfere with the laws of Mother Nature.