‘Once-in-a-Lifetime’ Photos Capture a Rare White Loon’s First Summer
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Every spring, Common Loons flockto Montana’s lakes to nest after wintering along the Atlantic and Pacific coasts. For the past three decades, Tony Gangemi has followed them, surveying the lakes near his home to photograph the stately waterbirds. He’s deeply familiar with their bright red eyes, black-and-white patterned plumage, and haunting calls.
This past spring, however, marked a first.In May, Gangemi got a call from his neighbor about an unusual-looking loon family on their lake. Right away, he drove over and hopped in his kayak. When he spotted the loon parents and their two newborns, it was unlike anything he’d seen before. One of the chicks—typically a fluffball of black feathers—was almost completely white.
At first, Gangemi guessed that this “little cotton ball on the water” was albino. But over the next few weeks, it developed a shadowy outline of its parents’ intricate patterning. This signaled that the loon was actually leucistic,meaning its feathers lacked most, but not all, of their normal pigment. “It’s a once-in-a-lifetime encounter,” says Audubon field editor Kenn Kaufman. Some scientists have estimated that leucism occurs in about one of every 30,000 birds. Kaufman guesses it’s even rarer in loons, since reports of pale-feathered loons are so few and far between.
Over the next few months, Gangemi’s life revolved around documenting this remarkable bird. Every other day, he returned to the lake to photograph the loonlet and its family for three or four hours at a time. He has long crafted his schedule so that he can be out most of the day to record birds. From 2 a.m. to 10 a.m., he works in maintenance for the City of Whitefish. Then out into the field with his camera he goes.
Gangemi was careful to keep his distance, sometimes simply sitting on the dock with his high-zoom lensand waiting for the birds to appear. He watched closely as the contrasting chicks grew up, playing in the reeds and pestering their parents for crayfish.
At the smallest sign of danger, the loon parents would fly or dive over to their chicks, making loud calls and flapping their wings. “They instantly are making sure that their babies are near them,” Gangemi says. Full-grown loons don’t have many predators, but immature ones can be swallowed up by eagles, Ospreys, and even large fish like northern pike. And a leucistic loon is even more vulnerable, says Kaufman, because of how its bright white feathers stand outagainst the dark water.
Predators aren’t the only challenge for loons in Montana, where they are listed as a species of concern. The birds are picky about where they live: Their breeding lakes must be below 5,000 feet in elevation; more than five acres in area, since they need a long runway to take flight; and protected by forest, without too much noise or disturbance. But human activity is increasingly encroaching on their preferred spots. Motorboats or kayaks and canoes too close to shore can startle the birds and cause them to flee their nests. Shoreline development takes away crucial nesting habitat.
Loons are also threatened by lead poisoning, which can occur when they accidentally consume lead fishingtackle. Only a handful of states within the Common Loon’s breeding range restrict lead fishing tackle; Montana is not one of them.
On their Montana lake, though, the loons made it safely through the summer. As the season drew to a close, Gangemiwatched eagerly, hoping to get a snapshot of the leucistic loon taking flight as it started its migration. First, one parent flew off. A week later, the second parent and the black-feathered chick left, leaving the white loon by itself. Gangemi worried something was wrong. After all, feathers lacking pigment areweaker than regular ones. The loon stayed for two more weeks; the last photo Gangemi got of it was on August 20. When he returned a few days later, the loon was gone.
“I didn’t know what I was going to do once the loon flew,” Gangemi says. In total, he put in over 300 hours taking pictures of the loon and its family. “It was a lot of therapy for me,” he says. “I really enjoyed the serenity.” He’s taking a short break from photography until this winter, when he’ll head to Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, to photograph migrating Bald Eagles thatstop there to feed on salmon.
But there’s hope for another sighting: Around the age of three or four,Common Loons typically return to the place they were born to breed for the first time. The Montana Fish and Wildlife Department tagged the leucistic loon, so scientists will know if and when it comes back. And since leucism is a genetic condition, there’s a good chance that a few summers from now, the ghostly loon, with a brood of its own tiny white puffballs, could haunt this Montana lake once again.