Sept. 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 took it to a rehabilitation center.
“That chick would have been dead in a very short period of time” if the volunteers hadn’t intervened, said program director Sharon Young, who has overseen the citizen-scientist group since 2018. The group consists of a dozen ranger teams that monitor specific areas of the nearly 5,000-acre lake, she said.
They sent the chick to a rehabilitator in Bridgton, who cared for it for about 11 weeks. Young envisioned the chick eventually returning to Little Sebago as one of four newly hatched loons this year.
Young was shocked when her rehabilitation doctor told her last week that the loon would not be returning to Little Sebago, but instead would be relocated to a Massachusetts lake as part of an effort by the Portland-based Biodiversity Research Institute to restore the state’s once-thriving loon population.
“We do our very best to take care of our population,” Young said. “So, to lose one of those, it’s frustrating and it’s something we can’t get over.”
Lucas Savoy, director of the institute’s loon program, said that while he understands the lake’s residents have a bond with the local loons, removing this chick from Little Sebago offered the chick’s best chance for survival.
Savoy said the institute has avoided removing 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 not planned to do so this summer “until this unique scenario occurred” in which the loon ended up with a rehabilitator after being exposed to human interference.
The chances of the chick finding its own territory on the lake were slim, and other divers were no longer welcome on Little Sebago after the attack, Savoy said.
Young posted a message in the Facebook group “Little Sebago Loon Watch,” which has nearly 900 members, asking locals to help with the request to return the chick to its native lake.
“The transfer may be taking place as I write this update,” she wrote on August 22.
The bird did indeed arrive in Massachusetts’ Berkshire County that same day, Savoy said. He said teams from the institute have been monitoring it since then, but he declined to say exactly where the loon went, as a matter of policy.
“It’s doing great,” Savoy said in a phone call Thursday. “It’s exhibiting natural behavior, so it’s swimming, diving, hunting all by itself.”
YEARS OF MOVING
Savoy said the translocation program has helped restore the loon population in Massachusetts by moving them to new territories while they are still young enough to adapt to a new location.
“They are very tied to the area where they fledge, where they make their first flight during the fall migration,” he said.
Meanwhile, it usually takes a long time for divers to recolonize an area, preferring to jump a few kilometers ahead rather than venture far from their home lake.
The project has brought dozens of divers to Massachusetts, bringing the state’s population to about 50 breeding pairs, compared with about 2,200 pairs in Maine, he said.
Still, Young felt it was unfair that Maine residents should have to give part of their wages to other states.
“They are risking our wage population to save someone else’s, and that someone lost their wage population because they didn’t take care of it,” Young said.
Danielle D’Auria, a biologist with the Department of Inland Fisheries and Wildlife’s Bird Group, opposed that position.
D’Auria argued that protection and efforts to support a species like the common loon are greater than any one state. She said Maine is home to nearly three-quarters of all loons in New England, and that the local population has been “steadily growing” since the 1980s.
A MATTER OF SCALE
Young said Little Sebago residents have a unique relationship with their divers, which they pay close attention to. She feels “responsible, but not owner” for the lake’s diver population.
“There are thousands of lakes in Maine. There are only a handful, if any, that have groups like ours,” Young said.
However, D’Auria said it’s best to view Little Sebago’s population as part of a larger state and regional population.
“We, as a state agency, have to look at things in a broader perspective,” she said. “All wildlife belongs to all of Maine, to all of Maine’s residents. So the loons on this lake don’t just belong to the people who live on that lake.”
According to D’Auria, Little Sebago has “probably reached maximum capacity” and cannot accommodate any more divers without risking further fighting between them.
Young disagrees. According to him, there are several islands where the birds have not built nests.
D’Auria also opposed the idea that Maine should not share its culverts with neighboring states.
She noted that interstate relocation programs have successfully restored several species to once-lost areas. And while Maine’s robust pool of natural resources means the state is more often a donor than a recipient, D’Auria said iconic species like the peregrine falcon and the Atlantic puffin have both been restored to Maine after their numbers had declined.
KEEP HANDS OFF
D’Auria said the volunteers should not have intervened when they did, since the interaction between the chick and the adult loon was still ongoing. The state generally prefers that people do not intervene with loons.
She said if the volunteers had asked IFW before bringing the chick to the sanctuary, authorities likely would have told them to leave it alone.
“These are normal interactions between divers and we don’t like to disrupt normal interactions with wildlife,” D’Auria said. “It’s kind of the difficult part of the wildlife world. It’s kind of a cruel world in some ways, at least in the way people see it.”
Young said that perspective — while she understands the logic — just doesn’t sit well with her. Young said she and other volunteers wait to intervene when two adults are fighting, but it feels wrong to see a chick die at the beak of an older loon in its first year.
“We would rather see the natural life cycle of being born and surviving your first season,” Young said. She said an adult killing another adult “is survival of the fittest. An adult killing a chick, to me, is a little bit different.”
Young also said she felt the state had cut her group out of the decision-making process with this wage slave. Young added that she may never have found out where the chick went unless the rehabilitator, Kappy Sprenger, had told her.
Reached by phone last week, Sprenger said the Little Sebago team is more involved with their divers than most other lake residents she has worked with.
Sprenger said she had less than 24 hours’ notice before officials arrived to take the bird; she called Young right away. Sprenger said this was the first translocation she’d dealt with, so she wasn’t sure what the process normally looks like.
“The whole thing just caught me off guard. I had no idea this was going to happen,” Sprenger said. “I was talking to Sharon about a possible release at Little Sebago after Labor Day.”
Young wishes the state had given her and Sprenger more advanced warning, noting that the wages had been stuck for about 11 weeks. She also believes they should have been given the chance to appeal the relocation decision.
D’Auria said the department generally takes public opinion into account when selecting chicks for relocation, “but we don’t take that as the final decision.”
Young said that if there were some sort of appeals process, even if it was ultimately unsuccessful in this case, “at least we would feel like we had a fair trial.”
“Or, let me put it another way: feeling like the girl has been heard,” she said.
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