Episode 34
Copyright © John Page Williams, Jr. all rights reserved.
This is John Page Williams with another reading from Chesapeake Almanac. The month is November and this chapter is called "Loons: Falls Finest Fishermen?"
It was a late fall Saturday 40 years ago. Captain Wallace Lewis, the legendary Reedville charter skipper, and several of his friends were going out aboard his Hiawatha to look for late-season rockfish in the mouth of the Potomac. He invited me along, and I accepted with pleasure.
The day was chilly, but I spent a lot of it up on Hiawatha's fly bridge with a pair of binoculars, looking for fish. The pickings were slim, but at last I saw what I thought we were looking for a half mile away: gulls diving and water boiling as bait fish found themselves trapped from above and below. I yelled down to the cabin in great excitement, and Captain Wallace pushed the big boat's throttles forward. Something in his face, though, told me that he didn't quite share my excitement.
We got to the scene in a matter of minutes, and the reasons for the skipper's reserve quickly showed themselves. A dozen common loons surfaced with satisfied looks on their faces. They had been driving the bait--they, had been driving the bait--not rockfish, and it was clear that they were just as effective at this tactic as a school of rock would have been. Their strong legs, and big feet set well back on their heavy, streamlined bodies, made them both fast and maneuverable underwater.
At the time, I didn't know that the Chesapeake even had loons, much less that they could drive bait so well, but Captain Wallace was certainly familiar with them. In his gracious way, he said, "I didn't want to disappoint you, but I was afraid those gulls were diving on loons. There are a lot of 'em out here at this time of year." He was right. We saw over a hundred that day. All were in winter plumage, with white throats and breasts, and gray-brown backs.
It was highly appropriate to be introduced to the Chesapeake's loons by Wallace Lewis. In addition to his chartering skills, he was one of the finest menhaden captains ever to work the Bay, and, indeed, on the Atlantic. It was no accident that he saw a lot of loons during his commercial fishing career. Those little forage fish are the main reason that the birds come here in the fall, according to data compiled over the past 20 years by Dr. Paul Spitzer, a research ornithologist.
Loons are well loved and well studied in summer by people on North Country lakes as ospreys are by us here, but there's remarkably little known about their migrations or winter behavior. As far as we know, the loons that spend this fall and spring here come from the Great Lakes, parts of Ontario, and maybe Quebec. When they leave those warm-weather habitats, they appear to head for the nearest salt water with abundant food and minimal ice. The Chesapeake meets those requirements.
The birds need plenty of food to prepare for winter. They are recovering from breeding, raising their young, and making a long migration. In addition, they molt in January and February, so they'll be flightless for a period of a month or so and thus limited in their ability to search for food. They need to pack in the calories during October and November.
Menhaden are rich in oil and protein, which is why we humans fish them so intensively and why rockfish fish them so intensively. The young-of-the-year, now three to four inches long, are ideal loon food. The Chesapeake's rivers and creeks serve as vast menhaden nurseries each summer, and observers of those waterways are familiar with the cat's-paws patterns the young fish make as they feed near the surface on summer evenings. As the weather cools in the fall, they head out to the creeks and come together in massive schools in the lower rivers.
For loons intent on stocking up for the winter, these dense schools are excellent targets, just as they are for rockfish and for gulls that pick scraps from everybody. Paul Spitzer calls these occasions "banquets" and theorizes that the loons literally follow the menhaden on their one- to two-month progress from the river mouths out to the main Bay and down to the Atlantic.
During the banquet season, Spitzer has come across some huge concentrations of loons, as many as 700 or more in the mouth of the Choptank in mid-November and over 600 off Coles Point in the Potomac a week later. On two occasions in December, he has found over a thousand loons during three-hour searches in the open Chesapeake off Mobjack Bay and the mouth of the York River.
As winter comes, the menhaden swim out onto the continental shelf and down off the North Carolina coast, where they move offshore, disperse, and go into deeper water until late February and March. The loons from the Chesapeake follow them down to the vicinity of Wilmington and Harkers Island where enough other species of fish spend the winter on the shelf to tide the birds through their flightless molting period.
For anyone accustomed to thinking of loons as solitary creatures of remote northern lake,s this social behavior on the Bay appears out of character. But loons have presumably been following these behavior patterns for thousands of years. We just haven't been watching them long enough in enough different seasons.
Paul Spitzer believes that the Chesapeake has major importance for North American loons. He estimates that at least, in past years, six thousand of them spent the fall here, with a lesser number in the spring. He's committed himself to long-term research to work out the details of their movements. His research has given us new insights into the behavior of these beautiful birds while they are here on the Bay. We hope that we can find ways to restock the menhaden in the Chesapeake.
For more happenings around the Bay in November see our other Chesapeake Almanac podcasts and read our blog post "From Fall Colors to Dead Leaves."
