Loons and Lead

Jane Naliboff took this photo on Minnehonk Lake in Mount Vernon, Maine, in early September. The loon’s story soon took a sad turn.

Notebook friend Jane Naliboff is a writer, photographer and naturalist from Vienna, Maine, a town in the foothills of the state’s western mountains. She is a photo contributor for the dailybulldog.com, which covers news from Franklin County. Jane recently contacted us with a story about one of the animals she follows closely and photographs regularly: the common loon. This magnificent bird is regularly a victim of lead sinkers used by anglers fishing in lakes. Jane writes:

“According to the [Maine] Department of Inland Fisheries & Wildlife, 30 percent of dead loons autopsied have evidence of lead poisoning, and death can occur within 5 to 10 days of ingestion. Buying or selling lead-based sinkers weighing one-half ounce or less has been illegal in Maine since 2002, but there is still a lot of lead in fly vests and tackle boxes. Think about all the split shot lost nymphing and the lead wire people still wrap streamers with and the effects on the ecosystem. Please, get rid of all of that old lead.”

Jane noticed that the loon’s foot was an odd color (it’s lifted out of the water here and looks reddish rather than black), that the bird was missing some flying feathers, and that its left wing didn’t cover its side. She sent photos to Inland Fisheries and Wildlife, whose biologists said the loon appeared to have a broken wing and could be in danger when the lake froze next winter and it needed to fly elsewhere. Jane contacted a bird-rehabilitation group, Avian Haven, in Freedom, Maine, which sent Shearon Murphy to kayak to the loon and try to help.

According to a story last year in the New Hampshire Sentinel Source, “Loons typically ingest fishing tackle in one of three ways, said Harry S. Vogel, executive director and senior biologist for the [N.H.-based] Loon Preservation Committee. When an angler trolls a lead-headed jig through the water, loons will often strike at it out of instinct, he said. They also eat fish that have broken away from fishing line with a piece of lead tackle still hooked to them.

“Loons also routinely scoop and swallow small pebbles off the bottom of the lake to aid their digestion, often ingesting lead tackle by accident in the process, Vogel said.”

Shearon paddled to the loon, picked it up (the bird remained calm) and took it to Avian Haven, where Jane says the owners and a vet determined that the wing was all right but that the bird had a lead sinker stuck in its gizzard and had an elevated lead level. Through a procedure called lavage—pouring water into the gizzard—they were able to flush out the sinker. The bird was put on chelation therapy to try to remove some of the lead from its system.

Jane was optimistic after the lead sinker was removed but says the loon “survived only a few more hours before succumbing to lead poisoning. Everyone did all they could, and we are all heartbroken.”

Like Jane, we were saddened by the news. Pamelia and I watch and listen to loons all the time in the waters in front of our house. When we were married by her late mother’s Maine cottage in 1995, a loon watched from surprisingly close range—a good omen, we figured. Just last Friday I saw a segment about loons on Maine Watch, a weekly public-affairs show on Maine Public Broadcasting. I learned, among other things, that loons are a bellwether for the presence of toxins such as mercury and lead in water and that if a loon ever bites you (an extremely improbable occurrence unless you’re a scientist trying to catch and band one), don’t try to pull your fingers out of its bill or you’re likely to get cut to the bone; they have sharp, serrated projections on the roof of their mouth and their tongue to prevent prey from escaping.

At the same time, notes Jane, who was able to pet the loon that Avian Haven tried to save, “Their heads are like velvet. And such sweet, sweet faces.” It haunts her that, a week after the loon died, she says, “the mate continues to call.”

Smart Birds
We’ve talked quite a bit about ravens this summer because of Bernd Heinrich’s visit. The other night Notebook friend John Clark passed along this interesting photo:

John saved this clipping from an old copy of a Maine newspaper, The Quoddy Times. As the caption notes, the raven seems to be trying to get the eagle to fly.

Our Sustainable Food Friends Need a New Engine

We got an e-mail this week from Justin Cutter. He’s a leader of the Compass Green sustainable-farming team that drove its mobile greenhouse—a truck converted to run on vegetable oil, as you’ll see if you click on the short video above—to The Naturalist’s Notebook last summer. As many of you recall, Justin gave a fascinating talk on bio-intensive agriculture and how to build healthier soil. Here’s Justin’s update:

“I don’t know if you’ve gotten our newsletters, but things have been going pretty well since we saw you last. After a great spring tour with Compass Green in which we were able to teach almost 2,000 at-risk youth from low-income schools in California and the Midwest, we headed into our summer months with great excitement, as we were booked by Lollapalooza, one of the biggest music festivals in the country, to be one of their featured non-profit partners. At the beginning of August we had a bit of disaster strike us. We were on our way to Chicago for Lollapalooza, and our engine burned up. After towing it to a garage, getting it checked out and worked on, they thought they’d finally fixed the problem but when I drove away after 5 pm and it broke down again. I got it back to the shop and spent a crazy 13 hours assembling a huge container garden of vegetables, fruits, and herbs, and drove through the night in time to set up in Chicago for the festival. We ended up doing really well at the festival and teaching many people from our beautiful garden booth, despite the fact that our truck didn’t make it, so we were really happy to fulfill our commitment there. Since then though, I’ve been dealing with the truck and have finally started cancelling portions of our fall tour. It turns out that we need a new engine, and for a truck of that size it will cost almost $14,000. Whew.

The Compass Green team on its visit to The Naturalist’s Notebook last year to give a workshop on bio-intensive agriculture and sustainable food systems.

“We are having an emergency fundraiser to get our truck back in action (right now we are short about $10,00),” Justin continued, “and we’re contacting everybody that has taking an interest in Compass Green to see if they’d be able to make a donation.”

The Naturalist’s Notebook is going to chip in, and we’re spreading the word in case any of you also wish to help the Mobile Greenhouse and get this important educational initiative rolling again. To donate money, go to: http://www.compassgreenproject.org/donate

All the Buzz
Somehow the video setting on one of our cameras got set so that videos come out partly in color and partly in black-and-white—a very odd effect. I happened to have that camera with me yesterday when I filmed this really loud bee working away in a rugosa rose blossom. Here’s the video:

This is what the bee and the flower actually looked like:

One Mystery Solved
That unidentified, hippo-faced caterpillar we showed you in the last blog post—and are showing you again, below—is no longer unidentified. As you may have seen in the comments section, blog follower Janice found it in the excellent book Caterpillars of Eastern North America, by David L. Wagner, and it is a white-blotched heterocampa (Heterocampa umbrata). Wagner writes that the caterpillar can have “a confusing array of patterns,” which makes me feel better about not knowing what it was.

Another shot of our white-bloched heterocampa. That was a really huge acorn, but the way.

Mystery-Bone Update

Back to solving our bone mystery. Thanks to Virginia and Eli’s research, we now think that this bone Betsy found on the shore might be the occipital bone of an as yet undetermined animal. The occipital bone is at the back of the skull, and that large hole is where the spinal cord connects to the head. More details as they become available…

Lost Toupee? No, Just A Hair-like Fungus

This has been growing for weeks beneath one of our thistle feeders. At first I thought it might be part of an animal’s tail, ripped off in a vicious turf war. But I think I’ve determined that it’s a fungus called Phycomyces nitens, and though the species hasn’t been that thoroughly studied, it grows on feces. In our case, it has sprouted on the site of droppings of either raccoon, fox, wild turkeys or bear—or all of the above. I read some warnings that its spores might be harmful to humans, so I’m not touching it. Perhaps if I leave it long enough it will grow into Cousin It of Addams Family fame.

A Northern goshawk flew in and perched near one of our feeders yesterday, presumably on the hunt. The small birds all flew off, and in time, so did the goshawk.

Don’t know if you saw this Canon camera ad about the endangered saiga. It ran in National Geographic and deserves highlighting because it’s both beautiful and substantive. Don’t you love the snout of the saiga? I think Eli’s nose is feeling like a saiga schnoz today because of early fall allergies.

Cuttlefish and Clothing
One of the most amazing disguise artists in the animal world is the cuttlefish, which can transform its appearance almost instantly in a stunning variety of ways. Could that be the future of the clothing humans wear? Read on:

http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20120907-smart-fashion-tips-by-cuttlefish

A cuttlefish.

The Naturalist’s Notebook late last evening as we did some after-hours work. Eli, Virginia and Julie will continue taking care of business in Seal Harbor when we head off this week to meet with naturalists and artists in New England and then travel to Great Britain for more bloggable adventures.

The postcard view earlier last evening in Bar Harbor.

Answers to the Last Puzzlers
1) The insect in the photo is a two-striped grasshopper.

2) (The five-year-old’s riddle):
Q. What do you call the time in history when dinosaurs were eating candy?
A. The PEZ-a-zoic Era

Today’s Puzzler
A math quiz: How many nines are there between 1 and 100?

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