The pond is not far from where I live, only a six-mile drive up gravel roads through woods and pastures. It is my safe place for cloud-dreaming, bird-listening, plant-learning, loon-watching, paddling and swimming. There are usually a couple of guys in small boats, quietly sitting and fishing, their reflections on the pond, just like it’s meant to be. Perhaps fishing is a way of meditating. The water is cold and clean, and so far, free from the choking vegetation of warm, nutrient-polluted water near farms and camps with old septic systems and fertilized lawns.
A couple who lives here in the summer — at the only house on the pond — help monitor the loon pair, watching and listening for them, and putting up floating barriers when they finally settle on a nest. We check in with each other on how they are doing, and I volunteer to record loon data for VCE (Vermont Center for Ecostudies). I had been watching them since early May, so when I read John’s email, I was excited.
“The loon chick has hatched.”
I typed into my phone, “I’ll be right there!” and took off for the pond.
I started going to the pond regularly when I wanted to try open water distance swimming. Curiously, there is no beach, and Fish and Wildlife has posted a “No Swimming” sign at the boat put-in, so I paddleboard around the pond looking at aquatic plants and songbirds, until I reach a big old pine tree that blew over a few years ago leaving a sandy place below the root ball, and swim from there.
I grew up in a city, a hot city in the Midwest. Swimming was how we stayed cool; air conditioning was not part of those old brick houses. In summer, my sister and I would walk to the neighborhood public school day camp where we all got on a bus to go to the local outdoor pool, a behemoth of a pool. Divided up by age levels from minnows to manta rays to porpoises and sharks, we were taught by high schoolers. I loved being in water, especially underwater, swimming along the bottom, holding my breath longer and longer, hair flowing, becoming a dolphin. I love how quiet it is underwater.
Pond and river swimming were not common where I lived. The creek by our house smelled like sewage, and some of the rivers were radioactive from World War II-era uranium processing. Forget the Mississippi River, treacherously fast and full of debris, and the Missouri, which flowed muddy brown from farms out west. Only the spring-fed rivers in the Ozarks were clean enough to swim in.
Here in Vermont, our rivers and lakes are mostly good, and it was here that I became an open-water swimmer. Starting in early May, I try to go until late October, when the prospect of hypothermia drives me back to the pools and their chlorine.
Loons love to swim too. They are the most graceful swimmers and divers. Sometimes they dive under me. I have watched them chasing fish underwater, zig zagging like a footballer. They tremolo when upset. They coo when they mate. They warble to their chicks. They build high nests along the shore from plants they drag up from the bottom with their bills and pile into a mound. They take turns sitting on the eggs.
The pond is not really a pond, but a small lake, shallow near the shore and too deep in the center for photosynthesis; ponds are shallower. It is bordered with wax myrtles, leatherleafs, wild raisins, royal ferns, and swamp roses — officially, a sweet gale shoreline swamp according to the Symonds shrub identification book. Flowering carnivorous bladderworts grow in the marsh where red-winged blackbirds and swamp sparrows nest.
A loon pair has nested at the pond for the last 20 years or so, when they first returned to our ponds after a long frightening slide towards extirpation. Lead fishing tackle, acid rain, diseases, shoreline developments and lack of protection for nesting sites and from speed boats led to their demise. In the early 1980s there were only seven pairs documented in Vermont. Conservation efforts over the last few decades have helped them come back. They are just about at capacity now for our lakes.
Our loons nested in the marsh for years, then three years ago, they started nesting very close to the boat launch, a strange move, so near to people and their boats. During the first two years, heavy July rains flooded their nest and they gave up trying. This year they went back to the marsh and built a high nest where they sat for three weeks. Then a rogue loon (a loon without a mate or lake) appeared, the egg was broken, and they abandoned that site, coming back to the boat area. They built another big, high nest and sat on it for three weeks. This time, they hatched a chick. Those of us who watched them were so happy.
The loon family could be seen from the parking lot by people putting in their boats or fishing from shore. The chick cuddled under a parent’s wing or rode on its back or swam so closely that it was only a dot in the water, but then, it would swim off to meet the other parent bringing a fish. Eventually, the chick began to dive, learning to fish.
We, however, are not the only ones interested. From high in a pine tree the bald eagle sits, watching and waiting for the parents to dive together, leaving the chick unguarded. Nesting by the boat dock seemed unwise, but they became accustomed to people, and perhaps predators were less likely to bother them there. Their educational outreach, sitting in plain view as everyone paddled or motored by, was brilliant.
I will continue to swim until fall, keeping an eye on the little family as they, one-by-one, fly off to spend the winter in larger, saltier bodies of water that don’t freeze. If you would like to be a loon watcher next summer, you can contact Eric or Eloise at VCE at loon@vtecostudies.org.
Micki Colbeck is a naturalist and a writer who chairs the Strafford Conservation Commission. Write to her at mjcolbeck@gmail.com.