Loony behavior

Mercury pollution is driving loons crazy

Posted by Erik Hoffner (Guest Contributor) at 2:11 PM on 31 Oct 2007

Read more about: wildlife | water pollution | air pollution | toxics | mercury

This year I spent some lazy late-summer days watching loons patrol a wilderness area lake I'd backpacked to. I should have been totally relaxed and enjoying this gorgeous and remote spot in the Adirondacks, but I couldn't help wondering if these birds had succeeded in hatching a brood, with no sign of little ones about. A friend at the Biodiversity Research Institute had told me of a paper they were soon publishing, which demonstrated the negative impacts of methyl mercury pollution from coal-fired power plants in the Midwest on loon behavior, physiology, survival, and reproductive success in the Northeast. The most impacted pairs David et al studied showed signs of lethargy and aberrant behavior (crazy loons), and they also "fledged" 41 percent fewer young. The birds' body burden of mercury increased 8.4 percent each year during the study. Sobering and awful.

So I cheered this month when I heard that New Source Review rules had been used by my state and seven others to successfully sue an Ohio company for acid rain impacts on wildlife, ecosystems, and structures in the Northeast. While acid rain is only peripherally related to the mercury problem we have from those same plants, it's a step in the right direction, and as this article points out, it's really good news for two reasons.

For one, the New Source Review program has been shown to have teeth, and "the government won't temporize forever with the question of when the repair or expansion of old power plants requires effective cleanup technology; in a word, that the grandfathering of dirty power plants can't go on in perpetuity." And most importantly, companies "can be compelled to stop externalizing their costs." The fact that the company has been given until 2019 to clean up its act (?!) is somewhat balanced by the additional $75 million civil penalty. Beautiful.

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2 Comments | Post a Comment

Of loons and cormorants

I'm glad the word is getting out. Both loons (a pretty bird) and cormorants (a nasty f***er IMHO) eat small fish, which can be contaminated by methyl mercury in the food chain due to coal plant plume fallout.

Worse yet, to aid in digestion, both species like to eat pebbles off the water bottom, much like a chicken eats scratch. Often they consume lead in the process - which is why many states have outlawed lead birdshot. But they can uptake mercury by that same pathway too.

Good article.

Onward through the fog

by Sam Wells at 3:34 PM on 31 Oct 2007

cormorants and loons

Loons are indeed very beautiful. One of our Inuit prints, by renowned artist Kenojuak Ashevak, is titled "Return of the Loon," and shows three loons on the water, in profile, nearly abreast. The image is done purely in black and white, save for the three red eyes.

Out around the forested ponds in which they live, one hears loons, without necessarily seeing them. That sort of subtlety appeals to the Native American religious imagination, apparently. They may be aware that they are in the presence of certain animals, though the animals remaind hidden; and then, if the animal chooses to reveal itself, that is a meaningful occasion. A Penobscot artist whose baskets I was looking at at the Mashantucket Pequot Museum in eastern Connecticut told me that, in connexion with hummingbirds, and the power that many Native American peoples attribute to them.

Cormorants are also very beautiful, IMHO (!), though plainly in a different way. They are highly visible; here in NYC, they are easy to observe, around the piers along the Hudson River. Whether or not they are f***ing around, they are always interesting. During duckling season, the mallards no doubt wish they would all go away.

I have no opinion on whether cormorants are any more sacred than other animals. But they (and the rather similar frigate birds, which I observed many years ago, one unoccupied and overpoweringly hot afternoon in August at the dock at Topolobampo, Sinaloa, while waiting for the ferry to La Paz, Baja California Sur, a ferry that never came) have offered vertebrate paleontologists some clues about the behavior of the similarly proportioned, very successful, flying Mesozoic archosaurs, the pterosaurs.

The biologists and ecologists at the Biodiversity Research Institute no doubt had a fair amount of population data on loons to draw on for this paper to which Erik refers. But, as they no doubt know, it would be interesting and useful to examine if there is a similar "population sink" phenomenon in other high-trophic birds that pass through the same or adjacent ecosystems, such as the Great Blue Heron and the Pied-billed Grebe.

Chickens deserve our true friendship! So do fish! So do other sentient beings! Let us learn to be kind.

by caniscandida at 10:41 AM on 01 Nov 2007

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