For 20 years I’ve worked pre-dawn on Saturday mornings at a golf course with four ponds, converted from farmland in northwest Oregon. The course dug out three new ponds to torment golfers. The original farmer dug the 4th pond before the golf course, for watering livestock and other rural uses. It remains to torment golfers and provide aquatic habitat, both worthy goals.
I watch the critters in these ponds and on the golf course. I see eagles, coyotes, ducks and more. By my second decade of work, I recognize how some of the critters grow and breed and migrate and leave and die. Over the years,the ibis came and left, the plovers grew wily, the salamanders vanished, and the coyotes emboldened.
Like most folks working outdoors, I identify with some of the critters’ daily struggles. I’m currently following the life of a loon, a ducklike bird, that stopped by the course’s Rae’s Pond every winter, by itself. Do not touch your set. You’ve entered--
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I liked seeing the loon show up every year, but I felt bad because it lacked a mate. It dove and darted between the placid mallard ducks and the grouchy coot water birds, all by itself, for a few winter months, year after year. I celebrated to get the picture of it that appears at this Bucket’s start.
Yet last winter, a pair of loons appeared. Maybe the loner had finally hooked up. They escorted each other around Rae’s Pond, and when this Spring arrived, they stayed, all summer. I didn’t see them raise a brood.
Autumn’s here. So are the loons. They apparently stayed and moved 400 yards from Rae’s Pond to the old Farmer’s Pond, which is much smaller. They are the only waterbirds in the Farmers Pond at the moment.
Many farmers stocked and raised pan fish in their stock ponds. These are small white fleshed fish called bluegill, perch, sunfish, and other local names.
Loons primarily eat fish. The non-native pan fish have overpopulated the Old Farmers’ Pond, so there’s plenty to eat there. I don’t know what the loons ate when they lived in Rae’s Pond, which was never stocked and has hardly any fish.
Normally the pan fish (hereinafter bluegill) would gather gravel in the pond’s bottom, making a nest for their eggs. Instead in the Farmer’s Pond, the bluegill heap up drowned golf balls to form a nest. The bluegill conspire with the bullfrogs to wipe out the dragonflies, but that’s another story.
I tentatively ID the loons as Yellow-Billed Loons due to their yellow bills.
Here are my remaining recent pictures:
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Now its your turn--
What have you noted in your area or travels? Any pretty birds? Please post your observations and general location in your comments. I’ll check back by lunchtime.
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