Dan's Feathursday Feature is a regular contribution to the COS blog featuring the thoughts, insights, and photography of Chicago birder Dan Lory on birds of the Chicago region.

“Yeah, we can do this. We have to do this.”

“I agree. Look, I’m wearing two layers, and won’t miss this outer shirt. We can use my shirt to blanket it.”

“OK, we approach it slowly, throw your shirt over it to calm it and control it. Then we carry it back to my truck, where I have a large cloth shopping bag that should work to hold it safely until we can get it to the rehab center.”

“Sounds good. Here’s my shirt. Good luck. I’ll watch our stuff.”

“No way! We both have to approach it together! From the water side. That’s the direction it will definitely head, if it tries to escape.”

“Awright, but I’m letting you manage the shirt. You’ve got more experience handling birds than I do.”

Those are the excited whispers of a retired supply chain manager and a veterinarian/part-time bird rescue volunteer who have come upon a Red-throated Loon during a Saturday morning birding outing at south Chicago’s Park 566. The loon is lying on a tiny spit of pebble beach barely fifty feet away. We are looking down at it from a raised cement embankment. Kelly and I are whispering, I suppose, because we don’t want to let the loon in on our plan of action.

Clearly something is not right with the bird. It appears alert, with no signs of injury. Unlike other loons, a Red-throated Loon sitting on land is not totally unusual, I’m told, but this bird doesn’t show the slightest inclination to flee. Something is wrong. Kelly has training and experience as a volunteer with Chicago Bird Collision Monitors. Intervention seems sensible, and possible.

I hand my shirt to Kelly and follow her toward the secluded area of the beach where the bird is lying. But before I tell you how our plan worked, I want to say more about this Red-throated Loon. Both Kelly and I—and many other Chicago area birders—have a history with this beautiful bird.

The Red-throated Loon is an amazing creature. It’s a bird, of course, but one that is so at home in the water that I can’t help but wonder: Is this maybe a fish with feathers? Its graceful, slender body tapers to a sharply pointed bill at the end of a long neck—a feathered, submersible Concorde jet. Its webbed feet are positioned at the far hind end of the body, as if to keep them as far from that sharp bill as possible. The streamlined shape and the extreme rear-placed legs equip the Red-throated Loon for efficient propulsion underwater.

All of the above can be said for any loon. What sets the Red-throated Loon apart from its cousins is its size. It is the smallest and most slender of all the loons—a Common Loon is three times as heavy!—and in the world of loons, size matters. It’s not just that it has to buy its wardrobe from the petite rack. Its small stature is directly related to the development of some fascinating characteristics specific to the Red-throated Loon.

Its flight style, for example. All loons are powerful flyers; I’ve watched many loons during spring and autumn migration barreling up and down the coast of Lake Michigan at speeds exceeding 50mph. The Red-throated Loon barrels with the best of them, but it adds a bet-you-can’t-do-this twist: it barrel-rolls. If it sees something interesting in the water below, it can stall, pivot, and dive—like a Caspian Tern—to snatch its lunch from the water.

Take-off is more nimble, too. The larger loons must get a running start across the water surface, sometimes as long as a quarter mile, to get in the air. The Red-throated Loon can be airborne directly from a dead stop on water or on land. This allows the Red-throated Loon to nest in smaller, more protected lakes and ponds where larger loons can’t navigate the tight landing strips.

What’s different about the Red-throated Loon that makes this possible? My hypothesis: a high wing-length-to-body-weight ratio. Compared to the Common Loon, for example, the Red-throated has more than twice as much wing per pound of body mass (based on body dimension data from several field guides). Now to verify this I need to find a grad student looking for a research topic for their thesis.

Did the Red-throated Loon’s small size give rise to these special traits, or did the development of these traits make it necessary for the Red-throated Loon to maintain its small stature? I don’t know. We’ll let the evolutionary biologists and theologians figure that one out. What I do know is that whatever the Red-throated Loon is doing, it should just keep on doing it. With a global population estimated at 260,000 breeding birds, it is the most numerous of all the loons. It must be doing something right.

The Red-throated Loon is a rare but regular visitor to the Chicago region. The Great Lakes are positioned nicely between the loon’s summer breeding grounds in Arctic Canada and its wintering grounds along the entire U.S. eastern seaboard from Maine to Florida. In 2022, for example, Red-throated Loons were reported in Cook County sixty-one times. Usually one lone bird, but sometimes in groups of five or six. In a typical year, none are reported after April 16 or so, when they have all moved on to their northern breeding grounds. Then in mid-October they start to show up again on their way south.

This spring was different. On April 28 a Red-throated Loon was reported in the slip that separates two of south Chicago’s well-known birding parks, Steelworkers’ Park and Park 566. It was still in its drab gray winter plumage, and birders naturally assumed the loon was just a bit late on its annual journey to the Arctic. But it stuck around. For days. Then for weeks. Gradually the Steelworkers’ Loon as it came to be called (or Park 566 Loon, depending on which side of the slip you frequent) transformed from its gray winter robes to its striking summer plumage, complete with the red patch on the throat that gives it its name. Chicago birders were thrilled to be able to see and photograph this loon in its beautiful summer array.

We also worried. As May drew to a close, and the Park 566 loon remained, it seemed less and less likely that there was a happy explanation for its sticking around so long. Loons go through a flightless period when they are molting all their flight feathers. Maybe that was it. But Red-throated Loons perform this molt in early autumn, not spring, so molt was not an explanation. Internal injury? Mercury or lead poisoning? Ingested plastic clogging its digestive system? Old age? No one knew for sure.

This was the context of our encounter with the famous Park 566 loon on that Saturday morning. As we ran our binoculars up and down the slip, and the loon was nowhere to be found, I breathed a quiet sigh of relief. Maybe it has finally headed north. But then when Kelly whispered, “There it is, on the beach,” my heart sank. It didn’t take much for us to realize that the bird needed help, and this was the moment to do it.

So, back to the execution of our best laid plan.

You’ll recall that we have moved down to the beach from the embankment. We gingerly approach the loon—Kelly on the right, holding the shirt out like a matador’s muleta, and me to the left, between the bird and the water. I am making small talk that is meant to calm me more than the bird. As I coo “Take it easy. We’re trying to help you,” the poor bird is probably hearing only “Hello. We’re here to eat you!”

Anyway. we inch toward the bird, and all seems to be going according to plan despite my chatter, until the loon decides it has something to say in the matter. It stretches its neck and lets out a string of loud, guttural croaks.

Sudden strange sounds coming from the loon are not in our plan. The sleek gray head, the dark red eyes, the long neck and dagger-like bill together with that unexpected loud croak—all of this is enough to put us back on our heels. And that hesitation is all the bird needs. As Kelly regains some composure and tries to throw the shirt over it, it dashes between us and is quickly past me heading for the water. I pivot—like a loon chasing a fish, I like to imagine—make a diving lunge into the water, and manage to snag one of the bird’s feet just as it is almost out of reach. I remember thinking how fortunate it is that the loon’s legs are far back on its body.

We hold its head still so it can’t employ its dagger bill, fold its wings in to its body, wrap it snugly in the shirt, and look at each other with smiles as wide as the loon’s bill is long. It wasn’t exactly as per the plan, but we did it. Now let’s get this bird to the Willowbrook Wildlife Center for care.

Except for a few moments when the loon managed to poke its head out from the shirt, the 1.5-mile hike to our cars was uneventful. On the way we ran into fellow birder Emily, who snapped a few shots to help us remember the moment. We transferred the bird safely to a closable cloth bag and within a half hour Kelly had delivered it to Annette downtown for delivery to Willowbrook.

Before Kelly drove off, as we shared high-fives, we realized one worrisome thing that took a bit of the edge off our smiles: both of us were perfectly clean. Even my shirt had not a speck of poop on it. Kelly knows from decades as a veterinarian that when animals are in distress they often empty their bowels. I know from watching waterfowl dive suddenly to avoid a predator, they always leave a cloud of poop in their wake. The fact that we were not covered in fishy-smelling loon poop was not a good sign.

By late afternoon that same day the experts at Willowbrook had examined the Park 566 loon and determined there was nothing they could do to help it recover. Though it showed no sign of injury by external trauma, the bird was emaciated, and its feathers had lost their waterproofing, so it could no longer float when they placed it in water. As Kelly wrote in her blog, they made the decision to “euthanize it and end its suffering. If we’d just let it be, the loon would have continued to starve and probably had a slow and miserable death.” The loon is now at the Field Museum where something may be learned about the cause of its decline.

I don’t have the slightest idea how to end this story. It's tempting to end with some generic comment like: “There are now 259,999 Red-throated Loons in the world. Hopefully what we learn from the death of this one bird can help us take actions for the benefit of its species.” But that’s just too cliché.

So at the risk of sounding maudlin, I will say exactly what I hope will be said when I pass: It was good that you were on this earth. I am happy I met you. Rest in peace.

Dan's Feathursday Feature: Red-throated Loon