Loons
An adult Common Loon with a chick riding on its back
The charismatic Common Loon is an iconic symbol of the clean northern lakes they require for nesting.
An adult Common Loon with a chick riding on its back
The charismatic Common Loon is an iconic symbol of the clean northern lakes they require for nesting.
■ Loons need a large expanse of open water to take off. They take a long running start, using both their wings and legs, to build up enough speed to become airborne. A headwind helps by increasing the speed of air across the wings, so they always prefer to take off into the wind. They can become trapped if they land on a pond that is too small. Their legs are adapted for swimming and are set so far back on their body that walking is difficult, and taking off from land is impossible. (See Mallard, this page.)
A Common Loon taking off
■ Loons forage by diving completely underwater and pursuing fish. Before they dive, they often put their head underwater to look for potential prey. To begin a dive, they thrust with both feet and slide underwater head first. Using their feet to swim around, they try to get close enough to a fish to strike, heron-like, grasping it (not spearing) with their dagger-shaped bill, and returning to the surface to swallow it. Loons can stay underwater for up to fifteen minutes, and travel more than two hundred feet deep, but their average dive is under forty-five seconds and within forty feet of the surface.
A Common Loon peering underwater and diving
■ Loon chicks can swim within hours of hatching, but they depend on their parents for food for almost three months; when they are young, they often ride on their parents’ backs in the water. At three weeks old, they are able to pursue fish a distance of up to a hundred feet underwater, but their fluffy down makes them slow and they only catch fish on about 3 percent of attempts. At eight weeks, they have grown adult-like feathers and can catch 50 percent of their own food, and at twelve weeks they are independent, able to fly and to catch all of their own food.
A Common Loon with chicks on its back
■ All birds molt to replace all of their body feathers at least once each year. Loons and many other species molt twice a year, and loons transform from the striking black and white of breeding season to a plainer gray-brown and white in the winter. Immature loons, until they are more than a year old, also have drab gray-brown plumage that is very similar to winter adults.
A Common Loon in immature plumage