5:34 a.m. 60 (delightful) degrees; wind NE 0 mph. Sky: coagulation of clouds; a few with a silver shimmer; opening reluctantly; a fogless sunrise. Intermittent streams: a cleft in the woods lined with pine needles and other woodland debris. Permanent streams: upper a hushed trickle; lower retreats underground farther upstream, abandoning its bed of water-abraded stones, bones of the hillside that two months ago hid blackfly larva and pickerel frog tadpoles. Wetlands: quiet and without fog; a tired shade of green, more buff than verdant, dulled by the progression of summer. Pond: thin, rolling mist, more an exhalation than an outpour. Old big-toothed aspen, sparsely leafed and leaning, a serious widow-maker hanging straight down; punky wood, easily excavated; a prospective tenement for cavity nesters. If my physical health mirrored the aspen, I'd be partially bald and teetering; in need of a walker. A chickadee, less interested in my sylvan opinions, finds a source of caterpillars in the aspen leaves; plucks a few . . . and then decamps, leaving me to ruminate.
Loon, too high in the sky to have left nearby Lake Fairlee, angles southeast, trailing its voice across a tessellation woods and marshes; a rain of tremolos spills over Coyote Hollow; if the call could be liquefied, streams would be gushing. Neck extended, back humped. Wide webbed feet, which extend beyond little tails, calibrate the wind. A loon is heavy, up to fourteen pounds; its bones robust; its wings small by comparison to its weight. Always flapping, never gliding. And fast . . . seventy miles per hour, arrow straight. In pursuit of fish, a loon may hold its breath for five minutes and dive more than two hundred feet into the cold, dark abyss of a northern lake. A family of four eats over a thousand pounds of fish in fifteen weeks. Long-lived, up to thirty years. Loyal, mates for life. But, like many modern human marriages, couples winter apart, sometimes separated by more than a thousand miles, alone or as a member of a raft, where loons bunch together at night and ride rolling Atlantic.
Summer 1977: I surveyed loons for New Hampshire Audubon, one of the best summer jobs I ever had. Had kayak would travel, literally everywhere from Lake Umbagog to Massabesic Lake. One afternoon that summer, I lunched with a loon biologist from Syracuse University, Judy McIntyre, who, at age forty-five, had written her doctoral thesis on the common loon, while she raised three children. Her thesis remains the loon Bible. An exquisite biologist with a sense of humor. "Anyone who has seen a loon egg is apt to remember it first for its size," McIntyre wrote. "Any female loon who has ever laid one no doubt remembers it for the same reason."
McIntyre had told me a species of black fly that feeds almost exclusively on loon blood, a relationship honed over millions of years, was responsible for more than twenty percent of nest abandonment. Female black flies, which drive loons crazy, find the nest by the scent of loon semen that males dribble everywhere when they mate; at nearly forty million years old, loons may reveal the earliest if not oddest cases of premature ejaculation. I've not been able to verify (or to disprove) the semen portion of McIntyre's story . . . I've not forgotten it either.
Loon overhead, laughing. At the quirkiness of evolution? Or, possibly, at my gullibility?