Loons!

[gailkate]

I know many of you get them in other parts of the country, but in MN the loon is our state bird and the subject of bottomless interest. Here's a link to a loon nesting site (they need sort of a flat space on the water) which was built by a devoted naturalist.

www.mnbound.com/live-loon-cam/

The eggs should hatch Saturday or a little later. There has been high drama around this (and other) nests because we've had such unbelievable rain after a long drought. The man who built this nest had to swim out and fix his anchor rope so the nest wouldn't be swamped. His blog tells the story, and it's as exciting as a thriller - to nature lovers, that is.

[jspnrvr]

Doggone, gail. I also switched over to the video of the loon in the hailstorm; after about two minutes I had to shut it off. I'll have to come back later and check out the blog. Thanks!

[BoatBabe]

That's great, Gail! Thanks for posting that.

[BoatBabe]

It's so great to check in on Mrs. Loon, and see the sun as well!

[doctork]

I can never get this to play/run.

I suspect that is thanks to Century Link (or CLink, which is quite apt).

[BoatBabe]

Oh, Wow! One of the eggs has hatched. When I tuned in, Mom was in the water. Then she lumbered back to the nest, stepped on the baby, and now she is trying to get the kid to stay still so she can sit on him. He's not acting real interested in that.







She keeps standing up and rolling the other egg . . .

[BoatBabe]

Oh, it's not Mom, it's Dad who seems so awkward on land and is trying to get the chick under him. The folks who are texting on the site say we know it's Dad because of the black marking on the back of his neck.

[BoatBabe]

Jun 1, 2012 9:02:14 GMT -5 doctork said:

I can never get this to play/run.

I suspect that is thanks to Century Link (or CLink, which is quite apt).

Maybe it wasn't CLink, doc. Apparently the cam was off air most of the morning. I just signed in at a good time to see the newly-hatched chick standing in the nest and Mom and Dad swimming nearby. Dad clammered back to the nest.


The cam is off air again now.

[BoatBabe]

Which made me discover the Eagle Cam. Just click on it at the top of the page.



I just watched Mom feed the kid ( Harmon appears to be his name, according to the folks talking.)



The Loon Cam is back up.

[gailkate]

The baby is tucked under his sitter's right wing and must be rambunctious.... How are you supposed to see a black mark denoting dad when both their necks are black? ... anyway, the sitter keeps having to lift his/her right wing to accommodate junior. No one's gonna get any sleep tonight.

[doctork]

Finally my timing is right! I can see the loon family.

[BoatBabe]

Great pictures this morning of the chick riding around on Dad's back. Then he climbed up in the nest and dumped the baby off in the water. Apparently it was intentional.





Dad sat on the egg for a while, and then yodeled in Mom to watch the baby in the water.

[BoatBabe]

The second egg still hasn't hatched.

[gailkate]

Right now the nest looks empty! There's a blob that might be an egg, but it's not very big. I am worried.

[doctork]

I'm seeing an empty nest except for one egg, no loons in sight.

Maybe it is a non-viable egg so the rest of the family left?

[gailkate]

One loon is sitting on something right now, but it may just be covering the hatched baby. I guess there's a lot of concern that the 2nd egg won't hatch. Here is an some excerpt from Larry the Loon Lover's blog:

The first chick this year hatched at 26.6 days.

The second egg was laid 2 1/2 days after the first egg so you would normally expect it to hatch 2 1/2 days after the first egg. However, because of something called 'catch up', the eggs normally hatch closer to each other than the time between being laid.

This morning is the 27th day since the second egg was laid. So tomorrow morning would be the "normal" 28th day of incubation. And Saturday morning would be the 30 day mark.

Those dates give us some time frames to judge by.

If we reach Saturday morning with no hatch, then things do not look good for the eventual hatching of this second egg.

So we will remain hopeful until then.

But hope will gradually diminish with each passing day.

Especially troubling is that the egg has remained uncovered for such long periods of time.

Maybe surprisingly to some, I am not as much concerned that the egg has been uncovered for a certain amount of time. If there is a chick developing inside, by now it can generate some of its own body heat. But the fact that one of the loons was not on it at all last night in the cool night air is of concern.

However, what is more of a concern to me that for the last two days the egg has sat out in the hot sun for most of the day. I think that is more of a concern that the chick in the egg would overheat rather than be too cool. Today becomes a critical day for the egg. Will the loons sit on the egg or will it once again be exposed to the hot sun?

[BoatBabe]

And that's exactly what is happening now: the egg sitting out in the hot sun. No parents around.


They both seem to be infatuated with the first chick. At one point, the remaining egg had gotten kicked out of the nest and was teetering on the edge, so it's nice to see that they put it back in the middle of the nest anyway.



If you scroll down from the video, there is another archived video where Larry (I think it was) removed a non-viable egg from the nest, so the parents would move on.


Seems as though these parents have already moved on.

[BoatBabe]

OH-oh. One of the parents sat on the egg today and smashed it. It's all yolk. No baby in there.


They must have known.

[doctork]

Larry's blog has an update stating that the egg was infertile and that there never would have been a chick. He posits that is much better than finding a near term chick that died from the heat or cold. So yeah I suppose the parents probably knew.

I don't know much about loon behavior though. In the past have other loons abandoned viable eggs once they have one healthy chick? Do loons usually have more than one egg?

Other animals would abandon a "runt" so that scarce resources are devoted to healthy offspring. Some humans pregnant with multiple gestation choose "selective reduction" to achieve a lower order, safer gestation.

A lot of mystery and philosophy brought to the fore here.

[gailkate]

Larry's blog on the miracle of the cute little chick from the one viable egg is quite touching.

It makes sense to me that the parents did in fact know. There would have been no sounds - I wonder when a developing chick has a heartbeat? Certainly there had been none of the scratching and pecking that a chick goes through to break out of the shell.

School kids all over the country just got a lesson in the joys and heartbreaks of life. Me, too.

[doctork]

Jun 8, 2012 18:28:42 GMT -5 gailkate said:

I wonder when a developing chick has a heartbeat?

I don't know about chicks, but in humans the heart can be seen beating on ultrasound at 5 & 1/2 to 6 weeks gestation, which is counted since the first day of mom's last menstrual period, so 3 & 1/2 to 4 weeks since fertilization/conception. In humans, 40 weeks is "full-term."

Larry says that the gestational period for chicks is 28 days. Most mammals are born more mature than human babies so there is not a direct correlation between chicks and humans' gestational duration.

But - "ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny." IOW, chick embryos can look a lot like human embryos for a while.

[Jane]

"ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny."

I was so proud when I learned that in college. And I think I can still explain what it means.