The Loon Never Lies
Before I re-immersed myself back into photography about ten years ago after a long hiatus, writing had been my creative outlet and before that acting in community theater. I eventually melded those two passions and wrote some plays including one I self-produced and ran for three weeks in Denver as a dinner theater that was unbelievably fun to do.
One of the other plays was a short one-act that I never completed. I titled it The Loon Never Lies. What does it mean? Even I had no idea whatsoever. I liked the alliteration, minimal as it was, and, well, have you ever heard of a loon lying? Nope, me neither.
So how could that intro paragraph possibly tie into my current photography? Well, you’ve probably figured out by now that this article is about photographing a loon. Not just any loon, though. It was a special and rare one at that.
It all started after I returned from my vacation where I saw some rare birds (I wrote about it last month – you can read it here). A few days after I got back, I hopped into my car and started moping that I’d be back to seeing “only” Colorado birds and that the days of finding a rare species were over – at least for a while. As I headed to one of my usual haunts, I passed McLellan Reservoir, a man-made lake I have driven by hundreds, if not thousands, of times over the years, never seeing anything but a goose or two swimming in that inexplicably (to me) uninviting body of water. And yet, for some totally unknown reason, I decided on that day to give a quick glance at the reservoir out of my moving car window. Nothing registered as worth stopping for until about a quarter of a mile down the road when my brain suddenly said, “Hey, you missed something unusual back there”. So I turned around, pulled up on the road’s shoulder, and jumped out to snap a couple of test shots at what seemed bigger than a duck but smaller than a goose. This is what I saw (as always, click on any photo below to enlarge).
Loon swimming in McLellan Reservoir
I immediately took a photo of this image that was on the screen of my camera’s back and fed it into Merlin, a bird identification app on my phone. This app, developed by the Cornell University School of Ornithology, is quite accurate most of the time. It identified the bird as a “Common Loon” which, despite its nomenclature, is actually rare for Colorado. Ironically, despite having written the play of mine The Loon Never Lies, I had never actually seen a loon, common or otherwise. What I really found interesting was this bird’s bill. It seemed to be “crossed”. Researching this oddity later revealed that this was a beak deformity specific to that loon and not any typical species beak feature. I would have wondered if that deformity would hamper its ability to catch prey and thus its survival but as you can see below, I got a shot of it catching a crawdad.
Loon with crawdad catch of the day
Before I explain why this loon “lied”, let me tell you how the day continued on a roll. From the reservoir I headed to South Platte Park where I found my first Black-Crowned Night Heron of the year looking for fish in the water.
Black-Crowned Night Heron looks for fish on the other side of the rushing river (this photo is from another day but from the exact same location)
Only five minutes in, frequent shooting partner Shelley texted me about a nearby rare bird sighting by a mutual acquaintance who had graciously included a map of its location. He claimed to have seen and photographed a Bittern. There are two species of Bitterns in the U.S., one very rare for Colorado, called an American Bittern, and one extremely rare here, called a Least Bittern , normally found in the Midwest, Gulf Coast and East Coast. This was the latter so that got me excited. I had to “decode” the map a bit, but I made the 15-minute trip there and quickly found the Bittern hiding deep in the reeds of a marshy area just off the South Platte River. They are known for doing this, which maybe accounts for some of the rarity in sightings. They are only about crow size and tend to blend in with yellow and tan vegetation. After a while it showed itself to find some dinner in the water, staying visible for a good 15 minutes.
I first saw this Least Bittern emerge from the reeds to look for fish in the water, similar to a heron in its focused fishing pose
The Least Bittern has caught a fish and has to reposition it to get it parallel to its beak for eventually swallowing it
The Least Bittern posing here is colorful but blends in with the surrounding vegetation
And when the Bittern wasn’t visible, other birds appeared nearby to take its place as models for photos.
When it came time to head home, I realized all my moping was (fortunately) for naught. What a day it had been! I would have been gloriously happy about it as it was, but a couple weeks later, the day took on even greater meaning. That is a looong story in and of itself but suffice it to say for here that I found out I did not see a Common Loon that day. In fact, I had seen a Yellow-Billed Loon, one of the ten rarest species in the United States according to the National Park Service.[1] To say this loon was “off course” is my understatement of the year. They are normally found in northwestern Canada and Alaska – in other words, the Arctic tundra. I believe I was the first person to see this particular loon here in Colorado and I may or may not get credit for the sighting by Colorado Birds, the official recorder and arbiter of rare bird sightings in Colorado, as the “discoverer” of this rare bird. Amazingly, it is still there as of this writing a couple months later and has been viewed by dozens of excited birders.
So, the next time a bird identification app misidentifies a Yellow-Billed Loon as a Common Loon, just remember “The Loon Never Lies” – but the Merlin app sometimes does.
(Feel free to drop me a comment below!)