Sep. 3—When volunteers with the Little Sebago Loon Monitoring and Conservation Program rescued a chick in June that appeared abandoned and had been attacked by an adult, they did what they often do in such circumstances: They brought it to a rehabilitator.
“That chick would have been dead in a very short period” had the volunteers not stepped in, said program director Sharon Young, who has overseen the group of citizen scientists since 2018. The group includes a dozen ranger teams who monitor specific territories of the nearly 2,000-acre lake, she said.
They sent the chick to a rehabilitator in Bridgton, who cared for it for around 11 weeks. Young imagined the chick would ultimately return to Little Sebago as one of four newly hatched loons this year.
So Young was shocked when the rehabilitator told her last week that the loon would not be returning to Little Sebago and would instead be relocated to a lake in Massachusetts as part of an effort by the Portland-based Biodiversity Research Institute to restore that state’s once-thriving loon population.
“We’re trying very hard to take care of our population,” Young said. “So, to lose one like this, it’s infuriating, and it isn’t something that we can get over.”
But Lucas Savoy, director of the institute’s loon program, said that while he understands the connection lakeside residents have to their local loons, removing this chick from Little Sebago actually presented its best chance at survival.
Savoy said the institute has avoided taking loon chicks from Little Sebago for the duration of the translocation program, which is in its fifth and final season. He added that they had no intention to do so this summer “until this unique scenario came up” where the loon ended up with a rehabilitator after being subject to human intervention.
The chick would have slim chances of finding its own territory on the lake, and was effectively “not welcome on Little Sebago anymore” by the other loons after the attack, Savoy said.
Young made a post in the “Little Sebago Loon Watch” Facebook group, which includes nearly 900 members, asking locals to assist in requesting the chick be returned to its original lake.
“The transfer may be happening as I write this update,” she wrote on Aug. 22.
Indeed, the bird arrived in Massachusetts’ Berkshire County that same day, Savoy said. He said teams from the institute have kept an eye on it since then, but he declined to say precisely where the loon went as a matter of policy.
“It’s doing great,” Savoy said on a Thursday phone call. “It’s expressing natural behavior, so it’s swimming, diving, hunting all on its own.”
YEARS OF RELOCATION
Savoy said the relocation program has helped restore loon populations in Massachusetts by bringing them to new territories while they are young enough to adapt to a new location.
“They’re really tied to the area where they fledge, where they make that first flight during fall migration,” he said.
Meanwhile, loons are typically very slow to recolonize an area, since they prefer to “leapfrog a mile or two” rather than venture far from their home lake.
The project has brought dozens of loons to Massachusetts, helping bring the state’s population to roughly 50 breeding pairs. Maine, on the other hand, has about 2,200 pairs, he said.
Still, Young said, it did not feel right that Mainers have to give up some of their loons for other states.
“They’re risking our loon population to save somebody else’s. And that somebody lost their loon population because they weren’t taking care of them,” Young said.
Danielle D’Auria, a wildlife biologist with the Department of Inland Fisheries and Wildlife’s Bird Group, pushed back on that perspective.
D’Auria argued that conservation and efforts to support a species like the common loon are larger than any one state. She said Maine is home to nearly three-quarters of all the loons in New England, and the local population has been “steadily climbing” since the 1980s.
A QUESTION OF SCALE
Young said the residents of Little Sebago have a unique relationship with their loons, to which they pay close attention; she feels “responsibility, but not ownership” over the lake’s loon population.
“There are thousands of lakes in Maine. There are only a handful, if there’s even that, that have groups like ours,” Young said.
But D’Auria said it’s best to view Little Sebago’s population as part of a larger statewide and regional population.
“We, as a state agency, have to take a bigger-picture look at things,” she said. “All wildlife belongs to all of Maine, all Mainers. So, the loons on this lake don’t just belong to the people who live on that lake.”
D’Auria said Little Sebago is “probably at capacity” and unable to sustain additional loons without risking additional fighting between them.
Young disagrees, noting that there are several islands on which the birds have not set up nests.
D’Auria also pushed back on the idea that Maine should not have to share its loons with neighboring states.
She noted that interstate relocation programs have successfully restored several species to once-lost territories. And while Maine’s robust pool of natural resources means the state is more often the donor than the recipient, D’Auria said iconic species like the peregrine falcon and Atlantic puffin were both restored to Maine after their numbers dwindled.
GOING HANDS-OFF
D’Auria said the volunteers shouldn’t have intervened when they did at all, as the interaction between the chick and the adult loon was still playing out. The state generally prefers that people not intervene with loons.
She said that if the volunteers had asked IFW before taking the chick to the rehabber, officials probably would have told them to leave it be.
“These are normal loon interactions, and we don’t like to interrupt normal wildlife interactions,” D’Auria said. “It’s kind of the hard part of the wildlife world. It’s kind of a cruel world in some ways, at least as humans see it.”
Young said that perspective — though she understands the logic — just doesn’t sit right with her. Young said she and other volunteers hold off on intervening when two adults fight, but it feels wrong to watch a chick die at the beak of an older loon during its first year.
“We would prefer that the natural life cycle was to be born and survive your first season,” Young said. She said an adult killing another adult “is survival of the fittest. Having an adult kill a chick is a bit different in my mind.”
Young also said she felt the state cut her group out of the decision-making process with this loon. Young added that she may never have found out where the chick went unless the rehabilitator, Kappy Sprenger, told her.
Sprenger, reached by phone last week, said the Little Sebago team is more closely involved with their loons than most other lake residents she has worked with.
Sprenger said she was given less than 24 hours’ warning before officials arrived to take the bird; she called Young right away. Sprenger said this was the first translocation she dealt with, so she was not sure what the process usually looks like.
“The whole thing blindsided me. I had no idea this was going to happen,” Sprenger said. “I was talking with Sharon about possibly releasing on Little Sebago after Labor Day.”
Young wishes the state had given her and Sprenger a more advanced warning, noting that the loon had been held for around 11 weeks. She also believes they should have had a chance to appeal the relocation decision.
D’Auria said the department usually tries to take public perception into consideration when selecting chicks to relocate, “but we also don’t make that the final decision.”
Young said that if there was some kind of appeal process, even if it was ultimately unsuccessful in this case, “at least (we would) feel as though we had a fair hearing.”
“Or, let me rephrase that: feel as though the chick had a fair hearing,” she said.
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