00:00:13 Gab Schuckers

Hello I'm Gab and you are listening to Naturally Speaking by Nature Up North.

00:00:20 Gab Schuckers

Do you wanna go ahead and introduce yourself?

00:00:21 Taylor Beidler

OK. Hello, everyone. My name is Taylor Beidler. I'm a fellow Nature Up North intern for the summer and I haven't been told what I'm here to do, so I'm. I'm quite excited about what we're about to learn together.

00:00:38 Gab Schuckers

Yeah. So what do you know about what we're talking about, anything?

00:00:41 Taylor Beidler

Loons? That's all I know we are.

00:00:45 Gab Schuckers

Ya, talking about looms.

00:00:47 Gab Schuckers

So about a year ago, in the middle of August, I went backpacking with my brother and his girlfriend and we were in the Adirondacks on like we were going between lakes. And so there were a bunch of like, little ponds and lakes, and we stopped at this lake. It's called horseshoe pond.

00:01:05 Gab Schuckers

So it's shaped like a horseshoe. And then we're on like a little peninsula in the middle, which is where I camp was.

00:01:15 Gab Schuckers

And then we went to bed, and the next morning it, like, got bright super early because it's August and everything. And my brother and his girlfriend were sleeping. But I woke up and I walked to, like, the tip of this peninsula. And I'm sitting there and I'm watching this pair of loons.

00:01:35 Gab Schuckers

And they're just, you know. They're just hanging out, going about their loon life. And then I hear a bunch of loons calling.

00:01:45 Gab Schuckers

And I'm like, ohh. OK, that's interesting. Like I don't. I don't know if that's coming from these loons or whatever. And then as I'm watching these loons, two more loons fly into this pond. It was exactly a little party.

00:02:05 Gab Schuckers

And so, these two other loons come over and then I'm like, oh, my God, this is crazy. I've never seen two pairs of loons together, but the loons just keep coming, and so at the end, I ended up having there were 10 loons on this tiny lake, and I just watched them for like an hour or two. I grabbed some binoculars and like they were just all, you know, swimming around diving. They were super loud.

00:02:31 Gab Schuckers

They were super loud, and then I kind of forgot about it. And then I was thinking about it recently and I was like, huh? I wonder why they did that?

00:02:42 Gab Schuckers

And then I looked it up. I couldn’t really find anything about why they would do that.

00:02:53 Gab Schuckers

So our first guests are Griffin and Nina from the Adonic Center for loon Conservation. And then after that we'll just have a few more guests who will hopefully give us some insight on the loom social gatherings and maybe even something else.

00:03:07 Griffin Archambault

Yeah. So my name is Griffin Archambault. I'm the research biologist here at the Adirondack Center for Loon Conservation.

00:03:13 Nina Schoch

And I'm Nina Schoch. I'm the Adirondack Center for Loon Conservation’s Executive Director and soon to be the director of Science and Conservation.

00:03:19 Gab Schuckers

What made you guys want to study loons?

00:03:26 Griffin Archambault

So for me it started back in 2020. It was a COVID Year and it was my first field job after graduating undergrad, I had had field jobs before that, but this was the first one when I was really out in the world, no longer going back to classes and obviously COVID was hitting. I started in May of 2020 a lot of people weren't able to work field jobs that summer because of restrictions.

00:03:49 Griffin Archambault

And everything was changing. But I was lucky enough to have a rustic cabin for my housing out in the woods with no running water, no electricity. I lived alone, and then I spent most of my time paddling lakes alone. The organization I worked for, New Hampshire Loom Preservation Committee, they do have a lot of volunteers that help out their field staff, but because of COVID it was basically for most of the lakes, unless they were really big, kind of on your own.

00:04:13 Griffin Archambault

So for me it was mostly COVID was kind of like in the background for me and I was able to just be alone and spend all my time with loons. And it really just romanticized like the job and working with the species for me because it just kind of became my world for that summer because there really wasn't much going on outside of that. And the cabin I lived on overlooked one of the study lakes that I had, and so I'd hear them calling every night. And then they make a really specific call when their chicks are really young and the day that they hatched, I woke up at like sunrise and I knew that they had hatched the chicks just based on the calls that I could hear. So it was just kind of inspiring doing that that summer when there really wasn't much else to do. And then this following summer after that, I went back and worked for Loon Preservation Committee, which is LPC for short, for second summer.

00:05:02 Griffin Archambault

Really just fell in love with working with loons more and then getting to help train some of the new field staff that summer and sharing my love with people. And then after that summer, I knew if there was ever a full time job that opened up with loons, I would take it and I got lucky enough that Nina wanted me here so.

00:05:19 Nina Schoch

He's been awesome. He's fantastic.

00:05:23 Nina Schoch

I started studying loons by chance. I have a veterinary degree and a Masters in Wildlife Management as well as a biology undergrad, and I really, really wanted to work in wildlife health and conservation. I had moved up the Adirondacks and was working at a private practice in Ray Brook and was looking around for other conservation oriented positions and somebody said this was back in 98, somebody said why don't you go to this loon meeting in New York in Albany? So I went down to that and it was a group out of Maine called Biodiversity research Institute, which is still one of our partners and they were talking with DEC about banding and capturing and sampling loons for mercury f or a three-year period.

00:06:08 Nina Schoch

And so I volunteered the first year and then ended up coordinating the field work the next two, and then it evolved into a partnership, and then in 2017, we became our own nonprofit. It was. It just was by chance.

00:06:26 Nina Schoch

And they're cool birds. But I really like them because they're a great way to talk to people about environmental concerns.

00:06:32 Gab Schuckers

So today we are really curious and we're trying to, you know, talk about and maybe figure out why loons gather in these small groups towards the end of Summer.

00:06:44 Gab Schuckers

And we just wanted to know, have you guys ever experienced this? Do you want to talk a little bit about it, maybe shed some light on it?

00:06:54 Griffin Archambault

Yeah, Nina has definitely seen a lot more in all of her years of monitoring loons, but I have seen my fair share of loons gathering, especially on larger lakes. They gather and socialize, and they feed together. Some of it could be explainable by maybe earlier in the summer by loons. They're coming together at the edge of territory boundaries and they're socializing and they're making it known to each other where those boundaries are.

00:07:19 Griffin Archambault

But later in the summer, loons that don't have nests or chicks that they need to protect anymore. They don't feel the need to defend that territory anymore, cause why spend all that energy risk getting injured in a fight to defend a territory when you're not even gonna breed there anymore? So they are socializing. It's interesting because they're so territorial early in the breeding season. They'll fight each other to the death for territory, but then later on, it's like nothing ever happened. And they're like one of the most social species you could see sometimes. Like they hoot to each other. They communicate so much, they cooperatively feed. There's winter studies that are done on Lake Jocassee in South Carolina by Doctor Jane Meager at Ohio Northern University and then doctor Jim Peruke at Saint Joe's College of Maine. And they look at the difference in the amount of time. One of the things they look at is the difference in the amount of time spent feeding for loons. Depending on their social behavior.

00:08:13 Griffin Archambault

So some loons are loosely social. Sometimes they socialize, sometimes they don't. Some loons are very social. They're always in a group, and some loons are very antisocial for lack of a better word, they're very solo.

00:08:24 Griffin Archambault

And what they found is that the solo loons spend the most amount of time feeding relative to the social loons, and what they think is happening is those solo loons. They're diving deeper and longer for one big fish to eat and get one good meal out of it, and then the social loons they're cooperatively feeding, kind of like dolphins where they find a school of fish and they work together to feed on that.

00:08:44 Griffin Archambault

They call them bait balls. Basically small little fish, and they just feed on them really quick, but then they have shorter, shallower dives and they don't spend as much time under the water compared to solo loons. So it's cool how there's a lot of variation in the personalities.

00:09:01 Nina Schoch

So, as Griffin was saying, they are very, very social birds, and even when they have chicks, sometimes they'll stash the chicks and go off and have their cocktail parties of 5, 6, 10, 15 birds. But in the fall they gather together in large groups on some of the lakes. And you can get 60 to 80 to 100 birds here, and they're molting and they're very itchy. And they're preening. You can see they are have lost some of the colors and then I can show you some of the photos from.

00:09:36 Nina Schoch

But they hook together and then they move and like, follow the fish.

00:09:43 Griffin Archambault

Something interesting that we're looking at in this video right now, which is a loon swimming on lake clear in the fall, beginning to molt into its winter plumage. Loons commonly when they melt into their winter plumage, it starts right at the corners of their mouth.

00:09:57 Griffin Archambault

And so when they have a little ball of white feathers right at the corners of their mouth, sometimes, especially from a distance, it can look like a ball of fishing line. And so sometimes we get calls in the fall about loons potentially tangled in fishing line, but it's actually just them starting their molt.

00:10:13 Griffin Archambault

But sometimes it is common to see loons that are tangled in fishing line. Especially around their bills. Sometimes it will ball up in the corners of their mouth. So I mean, it's totally understandable and it's a similar color and pattern so.

00:10:27 Gab Schuckers

Nina and Griffin then showed me pictures of several different loons and they talked a little bit about how they've been tracking some loons for years.

00:10:35 Nina Schoch

Yeah. And we've tracked our birds. I mean, some of the birds we are still monitoring that we banned in the early 2 thousands.

00:10:43 Nina Schoch

One of them was nesting this year. That was an adult. When we banned it back in 2000 so that makes for at least 26 years, 27 years old, because as an adult she's three to four years old and she could be older. They live 30 to 40 years, possibly more.

00:11:02 Nina Schoch

So it's very cool. I mean, there's they tell us a lot about the aquatic ecosystems where they live.

00:11:08 Gab Schuckers

Thank you guys so much for talking with us. I'm curious if people are interested in the loon Center, if there are any ways to get involved or if you guys want to plug anything.

00:11:20 Nina Schoch

Well, First off, we'd like to thank all our funders. You know everything from NYSERDA and the Fish and Wildlife Service for the oil spill restoration funds we have. And we have a lot of private foundations and individual donors that help support us. And we also have a lot of volunteers that help with our field work and also in the office. And if people want to get involved, they can just email.education@adkloon.org, or if they want to learn more about our work, just visit our website adkloan.org.

00:11:50 Griffin Archambault

Yeah. And like Nina mentioned, there's a lot of different stuff that volunteers do for the loon center. I mean, it could range from anything to being a field monitor to being somebody that helps around the center itself to being a rescue volunteer. We mentioned earlier in the podcast that we do have rescue volunteers who we train and once they're trained and experienced and comfortable, we actually supply them with equipment and then they can go out and rescue loons that are in need of it and bring them to us for evaluation. If we aren't able to make it out right away so if people are interested in becoming a rescue volunteer, they can either e-mail education@adkloon.org or they can also e-mail research@adkloon.org.

00:12:29 Gab Schuckers

Nina Griffin talked a bit about a man named Jay Meager doing some really interesting research. We tracked him down and were able to get an interview with him.

00:12:39 Jay Mager

My name is Jay Mager. I am a professor of Biological Sciences at a Ohio Northern University which is located in Ada OH, if you're familiar with Ohio, it's in the northwestern part of the state, and it's roughly an hour South of Lake Erie.

00:12:59 Jay Mager

So about a two hour drive, if you want to drive to Detroit and about an hour and a half drive if you want to go to Columbus, which is right in the middle of the state and at Ohio Northern University I teach courses in introductory level biology, but I also teach courses in ecology, animal behavior, behavioral ecology, and ornithology.

00:13:20 Gab Schuckers

Amazing. And what made you want to study loons?

00:13:25 Jay Mager

Oh gosh, that's a great question. I think it all stems back to me growing up, spending my summers at my grandfather's cabin. He had a cabin about two hour drive, give or take 15 minutes from Sue Saint Marie, Michigan.

00:13:41 Jay Mager

And it was a cabin that was fairly remote. We didn't have plumbing, nor did we have electricity. We did have a propane refrigerator and a propane stove, but it was one of those places where if you wanted to go for a walk outside at night, you could walk places just by Starlight or by moonlight, that special place.

00:14:02 Jay Mager

And without TV and without really regular radio, the sounds that we heard were mainly coming from the wildlife in that area, including loons and their calls really got me interested in learning more about them.

00:14:18 Jay Mager

And then as I got into college, I read a book by a woman named Judy Macintyre called the Common Spirit of the Northern Lakes. And in that book, she really highlighted the problems that loons faced with respect to things associated with human development and human activity, and I really got interested in those types of questions because loons were so special to me and that in turn led me to thinking about hey.

00:14:52 Jay Mager

Perhaps I can learn more about what lands need to survive and reproduce, and ultimately what can I do to learn more about those things so that loons and people can live in the same space and sort of how can we be stewards of the environment and steward for the loans that are so important to us.

00:15:11 Gab Schuckers

In your field work. Have you? I'm sure you've seen these gatherings. Could you describe them for us? And could you describe the differences between what it might look line in the summer versus what it might look like in the winter?

00:15:22 Jay Mager

Yeah. Yeah, I can do my best because we really still are learning a lot about them. And so the observations that everyone makes and can comment on are so, so really important. But you'll loons often will return to their breeding lakes. You will immediately after ice out.

00:15:44 Jay Mager

And so, in doing so, many of these birds are returning, sometimes solitary, single individuals, but often they also come in in big masses of loons and they sort of work out through behavioral interactions, you know, who's getting this territory and who's not. And eventually these things hopefully get settled.

00:16:04 Jay Mager

And then what we often find is that as the breeding season begins, loons are extremely territorial, as I'm sure you've probably seen. So there are definitely social interactions that occur between loons very early in the breeding season, a lot of it actually happens through sound, not necessarily through physical interactions, where loons are talking to one another from great distances.

00:16:27 Jay Mager

But then is the breeding season ensues what we start to see are individuals starting to come in to other individual territories, and one of the ideas is that perhaps these individuals are beginning to assess not only the habitat by which this lake provides or the quality of the habitat.

00:16:45 Jay Mager

That also being the size up the potential costs associated with trying to take that territory from another resident individual. And that may happen through a series of behaviors where an intruding loon might come into a territory, often approach one or both members of the territorial pair.

00:17:06 Jay Mager

And also what you'll see especially early in the breeding season, the birds will begin to swim in little circles, often facing each other kind of head to tail, so to speak, and they'll often dip their bills into the water very briefly, behavior that we sometimes also see with respect to courtship between males and females.

00:17:28 Jay Mager

And sometimes these little gatherings can sort of stop at that point. That is, the birds will begin to break up, and the intruder presumably will fly away. But sometimes we'll also see these little gatherings escalate into concepts between the individual residents and the intruder, and it's often the individuals that are apparently of the same gender, so males with males and females with females.

00:18:00 Jay Mager

And this could lead to something that might be quite aggressive, 1 bird might actually lunge at another bird, and what we think might be happening. They might be trying to stab it or grab the other individual. They may dive underneath and try to aggressively approach another bird, and in fact a lot of birds are injured or perhaps killed from being stabbed from underneath by another birds.

00:18:20 Jay Mager

And these can also result in actual chases along the water. You might actually have seen this before, where one very is actually some people call it wing rowing, where they're actually sort of swimming on the surface really rapidly and they're paddling their legs and they're using their kind of like a breaststroke, you know, in terms of swimming, swimming along the water. And these things can last a long time. And we think these are aggressive types of behavior, and it can also lead to an actual fight. So as you've probably seen before, loons can actually grab each other by their bills or by their necks, and they can, you know, really hurt each other, and in fact kill each other as a result of these social interactions.

00:18:56 Jay Mager

So this type of a social gathering where you see this circular kind of interaction to me appears to be something where the birds are actually ascertaining information from the other individuals. Perhaps something about the identity that gender or even something about the quality of the individual.

00:19:18 Jay Mager

And unfortunately, if this escalation doesn't resolve the conflict, it could break out into something very aggressive.

00:19:26 Jay Mager

Often what we also see, sometimes these little transition and something that's a little bit more benign, if I could use that word where the birds don't swim in circles so much anymore, but begin to swim with one another alongside one another, sort of in a parallel way.

00:19:45 Jay Mager

So they’re kind of side by side with each other and begin to move together and what I have seen at least anecdotally is that these types of interactions that don't involve the circling tend to be a little bit more boring and in fact might even lead to something that might lead to something that could benefit the individuals with respect to some other aspect of their lives. Could it be something where perhaps they're beginning to transition into crude foraging or doing something that is going to be beneficial to the loons and that leads to the questions about, well, what type of benefits could that type of grouping provide and these types of events occur later in the season when the territories are not so much as critical to reproductive success. That is holding the territory at that point, especially if there are no chicks on the lake it’s probably not that important. What we tend to see is that a lot of times these social gatherings lead into these types of behaviors.

00:20:50 Jay Mager

That pretty much very late into the breeding season, a lot of those social interactions between birds that are close together are sort of in that same sort of model. We start to see birds that are diving together and we sometimes see this behavior leads to situations where if they do find schooling fish especially small little schooling species of fish. Perhaps there's a foraging benefit associated with this type of grouping, and that's really what we see transitioning as we go into the winter.

00:21:24 Jay Mager

And So what we see in the winter is that especially as this work that we've been doing now in South Carolina for 7-8 years now is that some of these loons stay in these social groups throughout the winter. And you might ask, what might these groupings provide or what types of benefits they might provide?

00:21:44 Jay Mager

One is that you definitely have more eyes and ears to look for a potential predator, such as a bald eagle, and so there's definitely a benefit to that.

00:21:56 Jay Mager

There’s also a benefit to being in a tight group to what they call a dilution effect, which is basically if a predator is going to take you, whether it be a shark or going bald eagle, the probability that it's you it's being taken decreases as group size increases. So in other words, if I'm a solitary bird and there's a bald eagle taking one loon, there's 100% chance that I am going to be taken, but if I'm with two individuals, that chance drops to 50% and then four uh, three other individuals there’s tfur of us that has dropped to 25%. And if I'm in a flock of rooms that consisting of 100 individuals, then that probability drops down to 1%. So that's one idea as to why these looms may be quite social during the winter.

00:22:44 Jay Mager

But one of the things that we found in Jocassee is that some of these birds that are really social appear to benefit from foraging with one another, especially for species of fish that again are living in these great groups, or these social fish, or these social origins, fish species, and so that's a question that we've been looking at now against for the last seven or eight years and it really provides some insight to the loon to actually being perhaps, especially when they're not being territorial and they're not really interested in keeping other loons from applying our territories, might actually benefit from being in a group because it might provide these benefits of protection.

00:23:28 Jay Mager

But it also might provide this benefit of foraging, and that could be really critical, especially if the food supply is in a species that is, you know, a great big ball of food, because often having more individuals looking for these, using the term loosely, bait balls, or the schooling fish, your probability of finding them increases.

00:23:51 Jay Mager

And then if you work together, hopefully you can keep that bait ball together and basically begin to benefit from that behavior. And we have some really neat video of birds kind of working together where they're sort of diving synchronously and basically forcing these screwing fish out of water and all the loons in the group start taking them, which is really kind of neat.

00:24:15 Jay Mager

There are some costs associated with it. One is that the birds have to share these fish, so if the group finds the fish, they have to share it, which could lead to some aggression and some competition. And by being in a tight group, you could also, if you're sick and just like what you find in humans, especially after this COVID situation.

00:24:35 Jay Mager

You're risk to transmit a pathogen might increase too if you're in a real tight group. So there are a lot of costs and benefits associated with being in a group. But as a behavioral ecologist, I'm really fascinated by that.

00:24:54 Jay Mager

And I in contrary to some belief that loons are these really nomadic, isolated birds. I think they're actually quite the opposite. I think they're very social and that sociality is maintained through acoustic communication, especially during the breeding season. You had heard loons chorusing at night, so they talk, but with respect to coming back to the social gathering.

00:25:14 Jay Mager

They share information quite readily with one another, especially in these little tight circles that they appear to communicate through, and I think they also transit transition into this social behavior that we see late in the breeding season and early into the winter and at least in Lake Jocassee, throughout the winter season.

00:25:34 Gab Schuckers

Gotcha. Amazing.

00:25:38 Gab Schuckers

Yeah. So when we were talking to other people about these social gatherings, some of them were bringing up the idea that, like, they're being social sort of like humans, where they just want to have their parties and they just want to have fun and stuff like that. But I think what you're saying and correct me if I'm wrong is that it's more about foraging and like there's a lot of benefits that come with this besides being just like, you know, connecting with other loons and stuff and I don't know if you want to talk a little bit about that at all.

00:26:14 Jay Mager

You know, I think there is, you know, there are definitely different ways of thinking about social behavior. One way is to sort of think about the benefits like we do through social behavior. We feel good from it, but we are learning from one another by having these social interactions.

00:26:32 Jay Mager

And, you know, because we like to do social or have social interactions, it might reflect some of these benefits. You know, for loons it can be very important in these very what appear to be methodical, very ritualized social gathering, a lot of information transfer. That is, there's a lot of information that they're probably learning about one another and I can draw that parallel to human behavior, right?

00:27:01 Jay Mager

One of the reasons why we have conversations that we communicate is that we enjoy it and we're talking about, you know, having our fishing stories to maybe make it in the appropriate context where we talk about the one that got away or the one that we caught same site type of information can be very important to be received by the other individual. I think there's a parallel there.

00:27:20 Jay Mager

Between you know, the things that we talk about and inherently underneath it all, what we're learning from one another and I definitely think that's what's going on with the loons. They are receiving information as they go through these social gatherings and they're learning more about each other and that can be mutually beneficial. That is, we can learn a lot by talking with one another. We can do it verbally, like we're doing right now where or we can do it through a lot of other displays or physical and using our visual senses or auditory, using our ears through conversation, or even tactically that is using touch, can we communicate to one another, putting your hand on somebody else's shoulder, or perhaps giving them a hug.

00:28:13 Jay Mager

I don't think I've ever seen you give hugs, but nevertheless that type of communication is often mutually beneficial and I think that same thing is going on with the loons. They're probably not sharing fishing stories, but they're learning a lot about each other through these types of interactions, and ultimately it could lead to cooperative behavior.

00:28:34 Jay Mager

That is something where perhaps if there's mutual agreement individuals can be working together for one another with one another for each one of them, and I'd like to draw that parallel to human behavior. Too often the whole is greater than the form of the part.

00:28:50 Jay Mager

That is, with more eyes and ears, there is a benefit that is mutually beneficial to all those involved, and I would like to draw that same parallel with social gatherings that you see with loon behavior as well as these sort of social sort of foraging things that you might see later in in the year.

00:29:10 Jay Mager

I think there is mutual benefit by loans interacting with one another. I can draw that parallel to people if that makes sense.

00:29:19 Gab Schuckers

Yeah.

00:29:20 Jay Mager

You know, the more I learn about loons the less I know is one of my favorite sayings, but I have really grown to appreciate how important social behavior is between whether it's a breeding pair and the interactions between a mate and its partner, or between a parent and an offspring, and the interactions between mother and son or daughter and father, and son and daughter.

00:29:52 Jay Mager

And the interactions between loons at different stages of the year, whether it's during the critical breeding season when everybody's very territorial and really would like to not interact with many other rooms at a very close range, but also that transitions into this really what I think we're seeing important sets of interactions that occur later in the year and into the into the winter, you know, so there's a lot to learn still and.

00:30:22 Jay Mager

You know, it's kind of fun to think about all the different things that might be going on. Of course it'd be great if the loons just told us verbally and we're able to talk to us, but I that's what makes you know, doing this kind of research really fun is that there are lots of ideas out there and we can only learn more through watching. There's anything I could share to the rest of the folks out there, is that your observations are really important. Writing these things down and noting what you see and beginning to think about why these might be going on. Well, that leads to us beginning to examine those ideas in science, and in turn, we learn we can learn a lot about the loons, and hopefully we can learn a little bit more about ourselves in the process.

00:31:10 Jay Mager

Often again communicating with others and being a social group is often is, the whole is greater than the sum of the parts and it usually is a mutually beneficial type of situation.

00:31:25 Gab Schuckers

Amazing. Yeah. Thank you so much. This has been really great. I don't know if there's anything else that you wanna add or anything you want to say.

00:31:34 Jay Mager

I think it you know, for anybody watching loons, please write things down as you watch them. The first thing I remember working with Doctor Macintyre is that when I arrived as an intern, you know way back in almost, you know, 30, 35 years or so, was she actually took me out on an island and made and not maybe. But she asked me to live on the island for two weeks and do nothing but observe the loons and write things down and that led to not only me learning how to begin to describe what I see you know behaviorally, but it also began to be their questions as to why these things might are happening, and if there's anything I could say is that, you know, and then out there, try that same sort of, you know, I'm not saying it should live it rough it for two weeks out in a tent.

00:32:32 Jay Mager

But take time to observe. Take time to think about how to describe what you're seeing, and then begin to think about why those things might be happening. Because that's how we learn more about loons, and that's how we learn more about ourselves.

00:32:52 Gab Schuckers

If you have any stories or any findings that you want to share with Jay, you can contact him at jay-mager@onu.edu.

00:33:08 Jay Mager

If anybody has a question that or an observation that they'd love to share. I'd be glad to right back and share.

00:33:15 Gab Schuckers

Thank you so much.

00:33:17 Jay Mager

Oh it's been my pleasure. Thank you.

00:33:20 Gab Schuckers

We just have one more guest coming up, is Miller Oberman reading his poem Joy.

00:33:28 Miller Oberman

Hi, I'm Miller Oberman and I am a poet from New York. I teach at Eugene Lang College and I have two books of poetry.

00:33:39 Miller Oberman

One of them is brand new and it's coming out this fall. It's called impossible things. And the poem that I'm going to read today is from that book.

00:33:50 Miller Oberman

This poem is called Joy.

00:33:53 Miller Oberman

Joy, like the time I dreamt about a loon family. Just some common loons, not metaphors in any way, just real loons in a lake swimming near each other. So it was clear they were a set, preferring each other's company in the cold, still lake, with its depth of reflected pine.

00:34:16 Miller Oberman

The curve of their black heads and sleek necks, black and white stripes, then checks on their folded wings, floating so low atop their reflections they almost seem inside them, their wails like wolves. Their calls like an echo without origin. Their calls like an echo of lake. Oh what makes lake, lake.

00:34:43 Miller Oberman

How nice to think the male and female loons cannot be told apart by their plumage and that they build a nest and sit on eggs together. One of their calls is called Tremolo.

00:35:01 Gab Schuckers

Thank you so much. Do you want to talk just a bit about, you know, where you were and what caused you to write this poem?

00:35:11 Miller Oberman

I've spent a lot of time when I was a kid in Maine and so of course in Maine, there's like many loons and I was thinking in the dream it was not any particular place that necessarily I had ever seen.

00:35:30 Miller Oberman

It wasn’t super specific, but I think more kind of aggregate of the millions of lakes, beautiful lakes that I've seen that sometimes you know if you're lucky have loons in them.

00:35:44 Miller Oberman

And so it was very because I have been, you know, fortunate enough to spend so much time in places like that. It was just very literal and realistic, which is in some ways my favorite kind of dream when it just feels like very real. And you wake up and you're like, I just got to be somewhere that I couldn't be if I was awake right now.

00:36:07 Miller Oberman

Yeah. And then like, I mean, I'm sure I have more to say, but like the only other thing that I feel is kind of important to me in light of your project is just that I think when you spend a lot of time in nature if you can. It is something that stays with you, you know, for your whole life. And like those times when maybe you're living in a city in a small apartment and you don't get to go outside and like see necessarily, like, you know, anything more than pigeons.

00:36:44 Miller Oberman

Like spending time out in wildness and nature is something that really, like, stays with you. And I find it very comforting to think about.

00:37:04 Gab Schuckers

Thank you so much for joining us on this episode of Naturally speaking.

00:37:17 Gab Schuckers

Thank you so much to our guests, Griffin and Nina from the Adirondack Center for Loon Conservation. To get involved, visit adkloon.org or visit them in Saranac Lake, open daily. Thank you to Jay Mager who you can contact with any questions, and thank you to Miller Oberman, Miller Obermann's book, Impossible Things, comes out October 22nd, and you can find a link in the description. Thank you to Taylor Beidler who worked sound on this and thank you our listeners. My name is Gab Schuckers and you've been listening to Naturally Speaking by Nature Up North.