Splashing across Lower Stillwater Lake, the Milky Way reflected clearly in calm water, then swirled into chaos as Darwin Long quietly dipped his paddle into the stars beneath.
"It was late," he remembered, well after sunset on a Thursday night.
"You want to be very quiet," Long said of the hunt. "We had no idea how important that night would turn out to be."
When he first spotted the loon, she didn't have a name - at least, not that he knew about. He flipped on the camcorder, and reached for the powerful million-candle spotlight on the floor of the boat.
"She had a chick with her," he said, "maybe four or five days old."
Long hit her square in the head with the intense spotlight and she froze, eyes flashing red as she bobbed blindly. The chick slipped away, and Long started playing loon calls.
The loon started toward the calls; as she neared the boat, he switched to chick calls, bringing her closer still. On the second pass, he scooped her into the net. Minutes later, the buoyant chick, bobbing like a cork, joined her in the boat.
Long took some blood, snipped a feather, weighed and examined her and, before he slipped her back into the water, clipped a band around her leg.
Now the loon had a name: COLO 938-260-50. You can call her Colo for short.
Nearly eight years later, under the shining sunlight of the California coast, Long was again looking for loons, watching as they rode the Pacific swells of their winter home. It was December 2004, and he had caught a flash of a color-coded leg band he thought looked familiar.
"I couldn't believe it," he said. "There she was. I jumped in a kayak and went right out there."
Sure enough, Colo had been traced to her winter feeding site in Morro Bay, halfway between Los Angeles and San Francisco. Her arrival, Long said, brought him a surprising sense of familiarity and connection to the bay; but most importantly, it brought unprecedented opportunity.
By watching the loon every day, Long hoped to peg the day she left for Montana. Then, relying on volunteers on the mountain lake west of Whitefish, he hoped to know the day of her arrival - establishing for the first time ever the time required for a loon to make the migratory journey.
"And that's exactly what we did," Long said. "It had never been done before. Now we know. That's 5 1/2 days to make a journey of about 1,000 miles."
That fact tells the biologist a few things; for instance, that Colo likely cut overland rather than up the coast and across.
It is one of very few facts known about loon life, he said, as the birds continue to be something of a mystery to science.
"What we don't know certainly outweighs what we do know," Long said. "There's so many questions to answer."
For years, Long said, loons have claimed a place in the first few pages of every bird book, the chapters organized along what were thought to be lines of increasing complexity. Loons, with their haunting voice, big bones and Loch Ness look, were understood to be primitive birds - not as advanced as, say, songbirds.
The belief was bolstered by hesperornis fossils, evidence that a loon-like bird lived alongside dinosaurs in the late Jurassic.
But recent DNA work is rewriting the chapters on loons, showing them to be considerably more "advanced" than previously thought. Turns out, they are related to birds such as penguins and albatrosses, seabirds with whom loons share much in terms of both behavior and body structure.
They dive and peer under water. They eat fish. They have remarkably dense feathers. They have specialized legs, positioned far to the rear for swimming. They are social learners, not as instinctive as other birds, having fewer young but staying with them longer. And, Lower Stillwater Lake notwithstanding, they are - like penguins and albatrosses - ocean birds.
After hatching on small wilderness lakes, loons spend the first four years of their lives entirely on the open ocean. They never come ashore, and like penguins and albatrosses can excrete salt. Loons are so suited to waterborne life, in fact, that they cannot walk. Their legs are placed so far back that all they can manage is "an awkward belly scooch. They're almost totally inept on land. We've found young ones dead on the nest during years when the water went down and left the nest high and dry."
So said Amy Jacobs, a wildlife biologist on the Flathead National Forest. Her beat includes Lower Stillwater Lake, and she has known Colo since that moonless night in 1997.
Jacobs was on the water with Long, a biological assistant for the Maine-based Biodiversity Research Institute who was gathering data and tagging loons west of Whitefish as part of a wide-ranging study tracking birds from coast to coast.
The researchers wanted to know, among other things, more about how toxins in the food chain were affecting loons, how youngsters disperse when they leave the nest, where they go in winter, how long it takes to get there and by what route they travel.
Which is precisely how Darwin Long ended up with that big spotlight eight years ago.
It is a tool with which he and others have finally answered some of the questions. Loons, they now know, live for 20 or 30 years. They mate for life and generally return from the ocean to a lake within about 50 miles of the one where they were born.
That makes for regional "genetic clumps," which science is busy unclumping to track familial distribution.
Their life is not easy, what with coons and skunks eating the eggs and gulls and eagles eating the chicks. Then there's the long migration, with wind and weather and exhausting miles of dryland between resting spots.
Once on the ocean, there are sharks and oil spills and toxic runoff and fishing lines and storms that blow 100 miles an hour, whipping waves up 20 feet or more.
"About 50 percent die in the first two years," Long said. "The mortality pressure is pretty high, especially for a bird that only has one or two eggs a year."
That mortality pressure is one reason Long and Jacobs were so excited about finding Colo's winter home. She's a Lower Stillwater regular, a steady breeder who is at least in her mid-teens - a survivor beating the odds.
She's also Montana's only banded loon ever identified on her winter waters - identified, no less, by the same guy who banded her up north. It is a story of uncommon and singular coincidence, this story of a man and his loon.
"It's very, very rare in the realm of loon research to be able to consistently monitor an individual bird day to day for so many years," Jacobs said, "especially now, at both ends of the migration route."
Colo and her brightly colored leg band, Jacobs said, have been a fixture on Lower Stillwater for most of a decade, with researchers tracking when she arrives (late March), when she leaves (October), how many chicks she has (usually two), and where she nests (at shoreline or on one of several man-made floating nest sites).
She was last seen on the lake in July 2004 by local loon lover Brandon "Bart" Martinson. She had hatched one chick in the spring, but it was not with her at summer's height, perhaps lost to an eagle, still too fat and buoyant to dive for safety.
Long picked her up again in Morro Bay just before Christmas, resulting in a flurry of e-mails back and forth from the coast to the Flathead. No one, it seemed, had ever tracked a western common loon from summer to winter range, and the possibilities had everyone excited.
Perhaps a bit too excited. Some e-mails, in which biologist Long referred to the bird's "sex," "genitalia" and "copulatory position," were blocked by Jacobs' government computer server, which suspected loon pornography.
"Yeah," Long wrote in dry response, "I send e-mails of loons without clothes on."
In fact, he sent picture after picture, identifying Colo by the color code of her leg tag.
For weeks that stretched to months, Long watched eagerly, helped by the Morro Coast Audubon Society, paying special attention as spring sprung.
Colo finally lost her winter brown plumage, molting into her black-and-white spring nuptial garb, and Long's watchful eye grew keener. The time was near.
On March 24, she was there, fishing the Pacific. On the 25th, a head wind blew up, perfect for liftoff. By the morning of the 27th, she was gone.
"It was perfect flying weather," Long said. He had his "starting gun."
He fired off a message to the north: "As soon as she appears on your end at Lower Stillwater, we'll 'click the stopwatch' and see what we get."
Jacobs put up "wanted" posters, complete with some of Long's loon pictures.
On March 31, loon watchers Gary and Mary Sloan - who "were really hot on seeing her as soon as she came in," Jacobs said - reported via e-mail that they had "arrived at inlet of Lower Stillwater about 9:30 a.m. and immediately saw 'our' loon."
Click.
Five days, maybe 5 1/2.
"That's fast," Jacobs said. "That's really fast."
"I believe this is a first for the West," Long wrote, "so you guys indeed have something special up there."
The timing, Long said, hints at the route, and the route hints at where loon conservation measures should be focused. Colo's ecosystem, he said, is not just a lake west of Whitefish. It's also a Pacific bay and a bunch of waterways in between.
Understanding the route, he said, is the first step toward understanding loons' habitat needs. Five days is quick, he said, but not so fast that it doesn't suggest several stops along the way.
The next step will be to tease out the location of those stops, perhaps by catching Colo on another moonless night and equipping her with a transmitting device. He hopes to click the stopwatch again this fall, timing her return to Morro Bay.
That trip, he predicts, will take longer, as there is no pressure to get there and establish a nesting territory. The trip south, he said, seems to be interrupted by family reunions and gatherings along the way.
He also hopes that when her mate arrives in Montana this spring, he'll be sporting a new leg band of his own. This past winter, Long banded a bird Colo was spending time with in Morro Bay, and if it was her mate, then it will answer the question about whether couples winter together.
But for now, those answers will have to wait, as Colo is currently settling in for another nesting season west of Whitefish.
In the meantime, if you sit along the shore of Lower Stillwater at about dusk, you'll likely hear that distinctive call of the loon, "a sound you're not going to hear anywhere but in a wild place," Jacobs said.
It is the sound, more than anything else, that draws people to the loon, Long agreed. "It's almost a human-like voice. It's absolutely free, akin to hearing a wolf howl. It's the sound of the northern wilderness."
The fact that the faithful sound returns to the same lakes, year after year, gives people a special interest in "their" loon, he said. And now that we know where at least one spends her winters, we know "our" loon is of special interest for people living 1,000 miles away. She is also "their" loon.
"We're all connected at many levels," Long said. "Now, we're connected through this beautiful, striking bird. We aren't done with this bird yet. She still has so much to teach us."
Reporter Michael Jamison can be reached at 1-800-366-7186 or at mjamison@missoulian.com
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