Loon Vocalizations to knock your socks off!

We have 3 loons on Caesar Pond this year. They have been extremely vocal all summer long, and especially in the last few weeks. On Sunday, Sept. 1st, Drew put our Zoom H2 audio recorder (which, amazingly, is 11 years old) over at Caesar Pond at 3am. One loon began calling at 6am, and regaled us with many different vocalizations, some of which will knock your socks off! The pond and surrounding trees act like an echo chamber. Some of the calls sound like whales. ENJOY!!!! UPDATE: By the way, this was the last vocalization heard on the pond as this last loon flew off to spend the winter on the ocean.

Did you know that the different loon vocalizations have specific meanings? The website Loon.org is a great loon conservation website for information and audio clips (with their meanings.) I also really liked this quote from the blog of the Cable Natural History Museum in Michigan.

 "Loon Language: The mournful wail of a common loon echoes across the glassy water. From a neighboring lake, another loon replies with the same smooth cry. The loons are keeping track of one another, maybe as neighbors, maybe as mates, maybe as rivals. Sometimes the still night air is pierced by the maniacal laughing yodels of two male loons. This signifies a battle over territory. Home territory means a lot to loons. The longer a male resides in the same territory, the greater his chance of raising chicks to adulthood. The resident male will fight to the death if necessary to defend his island, lake or bay. Even if the invading male wins, the resident female will stay on the territory with the new male. An invading loon, looking for his own place to raise a family, will fly over an occupied territory and first give the wavering tremolo flight call. If the resident male is willing to fight for the prime real estate, he will reply with a yodel. The invading loon can tell by the lowest note in the tremolo approximately how big the defender is, and use this information to decide whether a fight is in his favor or not. If he chooses to fight, the invader replies with his own unique yodel. Loons can tell each other apart by their calls, and even third-graders can tell loons apart by looking at sonograms of their yodels!"

Stone, Emily M. “Natural Connections: Exploring North Woods Nature Through Science and Your Senses-Loon Language.” http://cablemuseumnaturalconnections.blogspot.com/2012/06/loon-Language.html, 26 June 2012.

Just so you don't think making a recording is easy... We have one audio recorder. The loons swim all over the pond and are usually at the end opposite to where Drew has placed the recorder. We have gotten lucky just once this summer. Of course, one of the best nights, a few weeks ago, occurred when we had no charged batteries, and the loons called for about an hour straight. Then, there is the traffic noise. We have the best luck on Sunday mornings when everybody sleeps in and fewer people are going to work. We also need calm mornings as wind noise is not conducive to clean audio. Lastly, we need a good audio converter, and Drew used Audacity (iMovie is useless for this purpose.) After mucking around with Audacity (a very non-intuitive downloadable program), he got the results he was looking for. He then uploaded the file to SoundCloud and created the audio version that we have here.