Valley Information – A Solitary Walker: Swimming with loons

The pond just isn’t removed from the place I dwell, solely a six-mile drive up gravel roads by way of woods and pastures. It is my secure place for cloud-dreaming, bird-listening, plant-learning, loon-watching, paddling and swimming. There are normally a few guys in small boats, quietly sitting and fishing, their reflections on the pond, similar to it’s meant to be. Perhaps fishing is a method of meditating. The water is chilly and clear, and thus far, free from the choking vegetation of heat, nutrient-polluted water close to farms and camps with outdated septic techniques and fertilized lawns.

A pair who lives right here in the summertime — on the solely home on the pond — assist monitor the loon pair, watching and listening for them, and placing up floating obstacles after they lastly decide on a nest. We verify in with one another on how they’re doing, and I volunteer to document loon information for VCE (Vermont Center for Ecostudies). I had been watching them since early May, so after I learn John’s e mail, I used to be excited.

“The loon chick has hatched.”

I typed into my cellphone, “I’ll be right there!” and took off for the pond.

I began going to the pond repeatedly after I wished to attempt open water distance swimming. Curiously, there is no such thing as a seashore, and Fish and Wildlife has posted a “No Swimming” signal on the boat put-in, so I paddleboard across the pond aquatic crops and songbirds, till I attain an enormous outdated pine tree that blew over a number of years in the past leaving a sandy place under the foundation ball, and swim from there.

I grew up in a metropolis, a scorching metropolis within the Midwest. Swimming was how we stayed cool; air-con was not a part of these outdated brick homes. In summer time, my sister and I might stroll to the neighborhood public college day camp the place all of us obtained on a bus to go to the native out of doors pool, a behemoth of a pool. Divided up by age ranges from minnows to manta rays to porpoises and sharks, we had been taught by excessive schoolers. I liked being in water, particularly underwater, swimming alongside the underside, holding my breath longer and longer, hair flowing, turning into a dolphin. I like how quiet it’s underwater.

Pond and river swimming weren’t frequent the place I lived. The creek by our home smelled like sewage, and a number of the rivers had been radioactive from World War II-era uranium processing. Forget the Mississippi River, treacherously quick and stuffed with particles, and the Missouri, which flowed muddy brown from farms out west. Only the spring-fed rivers within the Ozarks had been clear sufficient to swim in.

Here in Vermont, our rivers and lakes are principally good, and it was right here that I grew to become an open-water swimmer. Starting in early May, I attempt to go till late October, when the prospect of hypothermia drives me again to the swimming pools and their chlorine.

Loons like to swim too. They are probably the most swish swimmers and divers. Sometimes they dive beneath me. I’ve watched them chasing fish underwater, zig zagging like a footballer. They tremolo when upset. They coo after they mate. They warble to their chicks. They construct excessive nests alongside the shore from crops they drag up from the underside with their payments and pile right into a mound. They take turns sitting on the eggs.

The pond just isn’t actually a pond, however a small lake, shallow close to the shore and too deep within the heart for photosynthesis; ponds are shallower. It is bordered with wax myrtles, leatherleafs, wild raisins, royal ferns, and swamp roses — formally, a candy gale shoreline swamp in accordance with the Symonds shrub identification e-book. Flowering carnivorous bladderworts develop within the marsh the place red-winged blackbirds and swamp sparrows nest.

A loon pair has nested on the pond for the final 20 years or so, after they first returned to our ponds after an extended horrifying slide in direction of extirpation. Lead fishing sort out, acid rain, ailments, shoreline developments and lack of safety for nesting websites and from pace boats led to their demise. In the early Nineteen Eighties there have been solely seven pairs documented in Vermont. Conservation efforts over the previous few many years have helped them come again. They are nearly at capability now for our lakes.

Our loons nested within the marsh for years, then three years in the past, they began nesting very near the boat launch, an odd transfer, so close to to folks and their boats. During the primary two years, heavy July rains flooded their nest and so they gave up attempting. This yr they went again to the marsh and constructed a excessive nest the place they sat for 3 weeks. Then a rogue loon (a loon with no mate or lake) appeared, the egg was damaged, and so they deserted that website, coming again to the boat space. They constructed one other massive, excessive nest and sat on it for 3 weeks. This time, they hatched a chick. Those of us who watched them had been so blissful.

The loon household could possibly be seen from the car parking zone by folks placing of their boats or fishing from shore. The chick cuddled beneath a father or mother’s wing or rode on its again or swam so carefully that it was solely a dot within the water, however then, it could swim off to satisfy the opposite father or mother bringing a fish. Eventually, the chick started to dive, studying to fish.

We, nevertheless, will not be the one ones . From excessive in a pine tree the bald eagle sits, watching and ready for the mother and father to dive collectively, leaving the chick unguarded. Nesting by the boat dock appeared unwise, however they grew to become accustomed to folks, and maybe predators had been much less more likely to hassle them there. Their instructional outreach, sitting in plain view as everybody paddled or motored by, was good.

I’ll proceed to swim till fall, maintaining a tally of the little household as they, one-by-one, fly off to spend the winter in bigger, saltier our bodies of water that don’t freeze. If you wish to be a loon watcher subsequent summer time, you possibly can contact Eric or Eloise at VCE at [email protected].

Micki Colbeck is a naturalist and a author who chairs the Strafford Conservation Commission. Write to her at [email protected].