OCTOBER 2, 2021 – This year we’ve seen extraordinary loon- and eagle-activity on our lake. Along our shoreline, especially, eagles have been loud, busy, and majestic. Loons, meanwhile, have dominated the waters and developed unusual familiarity with humans passing by aboard pontoons. Little action has been caught on camera. Loons and eagles are much too fast for capture.
Loons calls are quintessentially “Northwoods.” Among my favorite experiences here: walking along the shoreline path by day or sitting on the porch by night and hearing loons call over still waters. On the lake we frequently see loons swimming and diving for food. In years past, we couldn’t get within 100 feet of a loon before it executed a quick, deep-dive. It’d stay submerged for 10, 20 seconds (loons can hold their breath for up to 90 seconds), then resurface opposite from where we’d be looking. Nowadays, I must slow the boat and motor clear of loons—they show no fear of being run over.
Sometimes loons “laugh,” but the intensity signals danger, not something humorous.
For the past week, my wife has been hosting guests at the Red Cabin (it’s been a “girls’ weekend” there; I’ve been relegated to the cabin at Björnholm, on call only as captain of the cruise ship). While we were loon-watching from said cruise ship late yesterday, one observant guest told us that early in the morning she’d witnessed nature in its survival-of-the-fittest mode—eagle versus loon.
She was familiar with the loon’s high wing loading (ratio of mass to wing area), making take-offs difficult, made more so by far-back placement of the loon’s feet. When she saw the airborne waterfowl near our shore, she did a double-take. At first she saw a loon—feet dangling behind it. An instant later she realized it was a bald eagle—knife-edged, ratchet-closing talons clutching the loon. The national emblem had snatched the Minnesota state bird (though this scene unfolded in the Dairy State) and was hauling it off for . . . breakfast.
If you mourn for the victim-loon and misgivings about the rapacious eagle, turn for a moment to a scene in Maine just a year ago. The autopsy of a bald eagle floating beside the floating body of a loon chick revealed that the eagle had been stabbed through the heart by an adult loon’s beak. Take that for breakfast, you murderous raptor!
In any case, deepest human sympathy should be reserved for lower creatures in the food chain: fish. I recently watched an eagle, landing gear in attack mode, swoop down about 100 feet from where I was sitting ashore and grab a two-foot-long fish from its quiet—and all too clear—liquid habitat. When the eagle flapped its powerful wings for altitude, the weight of the flapping fish caused piscis to lose its spine in the eagle’s vise grip. The lower half of the lower end of the food chain splashed into the water as the higher end of the food chain flew higher for another look in its unending search for food.
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© 2021 by Eric Nilsson
