Loon Magic/Loon Magic - Wayzata Technology (8011) (1993).iso/mac/mac text/04 Status - Today

Text File | 1993-07-20 | 4KB | 74 lines

   The Common Loon Today

    Over the decades since Bent described the loon's breeding range
many problems more serious for loons than birdshot have emerged.
Lakeshore development has had probably the most devastating
consequences. Except in northern Maine and in the large federal
tracts in northern Minnesota, lakes without a necklace of summer
homes are hard to find these days. The post-World War II economic
boom, coupled with a new interest in the outdoors, fueled an all-out
assault on our northern lakes.

    I learned this history lesson in July of 1959 during my first fishing
trip to northern Wisconsin. I was twelve years old and could think of
little else but muskies as long as an oar. There were no
superhighways then from my hometown of Sun Prairie, Wisconsin to
the Lac du Flambeau fishing paradise in Vilas County, nearly three
hundred miles north. With no extra lanes or bypasses, it seemed to
take forever to drive through Wausau, a modest city even now.

    What I had expected to find and what I found when I arrived in
the "north" were quite different. My childhood fantasies of wild
country brimming with fish and wildlife collided violently with the
reality of countless lakeside developments, backwoods intersections
cluttered with a bewildering array of resort and supperclub signs,
commercialized Indian ceremonials and ubiquitous bait shops hyping
minnows "Guaranteed to Catch Fish or Die Trying." For northern
Wisconsin, the decade of the 50s was the beginning of the end for
authentic wilderness. No one was counting loons then, but as nest
sites became beaches, boat docks or picnic grounds, loons were
gradually pushed to remote lake corners until the necklace of
whitewashed cabins became a noose choking off the last breath of
wildness. Yet, loons did not disappear from all of Wisconsin's
northern lakes. Many adapted to their new neighbors, and a sizable
population still calls Wisconsin home. But the lakes are different now,
and life for the remaining loons is ...well, who can say?

This pattern of lakeshore development on northern lakes was similar
in most loon states. In some areas of the Northeast, the lot sizes were
larger and more homes sported redwood or cedar siding, but the
overall effect was the same: loons had to share their lakes with many
more people. While hard data on loon populations between 1950 and
1980 are limited, it is clear that during that period loon numbers in
most of the United States declined substantially. Speaking at a loon
conference, Richard Plunkett confirmed what many lakeshore
observers believed when he noted that "Available data from
Minnesota, Wisconsin, Michigan, New York, Vermont, New
Hampshire, Massachusetts and Maine suggest a northward shrinkage
of the historically occupied breeding range of the common loon." No
substantial breeding populations of loons now exist south of central
Vermont or central New Hampshire. Only a few pairs nest in
Massachusetts, and no loons breed anymore in Pennsylvania,
Connecticut or Rhode Island.

    While loss of habitat is the primary factor in the decline of the
common loon, the problems of harassment of nesting loons,
deterioration of water quality, disease, and oil spills on coastal
wintering areas have all contributed to the gradual reduction of the
United States' common loon breeding population. Rawson Wood,
Chairman of the North American Loon Fund, captured the  current
status of the loon in a single sentence: "The breeding range of this
extraordinary birdmlong the symbol of north country
wildernessmhas been shrinking wherever people have brought boats
to its lakes and camps to the shorelines." Loons can exist with people,
but both the loons and the people have to work at it. The people
especially.

    The effects of development become clear when wilderness areas
are surveyed for loon populations. In areas where solitude is still a
characteristic of the lake environment, loons continue to do well. In
northern Minnesota over ninety percent of the lakes fifty acres or
larger support breeding loons. In Ontario's Quetico Provincial Park,
nearly every lake has a pair or two. In remote areas of western
Ontario, loons are still at their maximum biological carrying capacity.