OTIS — Stay quiet. No sudden moves. It shouldn't even know you're here.
Thomas Gregg kayaks through the reservoir toward a marshy island. No other humans in sight. “You’ve got to woo the loon,” he says.
Gregg paddles a bit, then pauses for a closer look through binoculars. On an early July day, Thomas Gregg scoped out loons in an Otis lake. He scans the shoreline ahead.
Nothing yet. Binoculars drop. Back to paddling.
“I’ve got to play it cool,” Gregg, a loon biologist, says. “It’s a very finesse-based game.” But he's getting closer.
“If the loon is aware they’re being pursued, they’re never going to relax,” Gregg says. He paddles ahead. “And if her chin moves her neck forward and down” — he demonstrates like this, forward and down — “it’s time to go.
” Closer, still. And — right there, do you see it? — up pops a head from a stand of cattails: a loon. The bird, aware but unbothered, peers back.
It's an uncommon sighting in this part of New England. This loon and its mate are one of only 50 known pairs in Massachusetts. From May to November, five days a week, Gregg paddles lakes and ponds in Berkshire County to observe, track and collect data on loon behavior.
Each week, he reports his findings to Biodiversity Research Institute, a Maine-based nonprofit. The Institute, part of the United Nations Global Compact, leads conservation efforts across 40 countries. And part of that work is a collaboration with Massachusetts’ Division of Fisheries and Wildlife: reinvigorating the loon population in Western Massachusetts.
At one point, loons were wiped out entirely from Massachusetts, said Lucas Savoy, the wildlife research biologist who runs the Biodiversity Research Institute. “A species lost is a loss to the community," Savoy said. Long ago, Massachusetts was home to hundreds of loons.
For centuries, loons held a key role within the ecosystem, controlling invasive species like sunfish and acting as a natural culling agent. “They’re of huge value ecologically,” Savoy said. Not to mention, loons are known for their regal beauty: bills like daggers, black-and-white scalloped coats, striking crimson eyes.
Their signature calls — melancholy wails, yodels, tremolos and hoots — announce their presence, especially at night, in the distance. "The loons! The loons! They're welcoming us back!" Katharine Hepburn's character declares upon hearing them in the opening scene of the 1981 film "On Golden Pond," set in New Hampshire. A loon guards its nest in the Otis Reservoir.
But, by the late 1800s in Massachusetts, loons were gone. As humans developed the shorelines, loons sought nesting sites far away. Since loons were direct competition for fish, fishermen also put bounties on the birds.
Loons go by other names, including: Great northern diver: Another name for the common loon. Call-up-a-storm: New Englanders of yore called them this, thinking the loon's calls predicted stormy weather. Gavia immer: The scientific name, in Latin, for the common loon.
Gavia means "seabird" and immer means "submerged.” Loonlet: A baby loon. Loons have four main calls .
The wail: A perhaps haunting, melancholy call. Used for long distance communication between mated pairs. The hoot: A soft, short call between mated pairs and their loonlets.
The yodel: The call male loons when threatened. The tremolo: Sounds like a “crazy laugh.” A response to perceived threats.
Source: Loon.org , Loon Preservation Committee “A lot of people were shooting loons, taking eggs, disposing of eggs," Savoy said. In 1918, the Migratory Bird Treaty Act declared loons a protected species.
And in 1975 — who knows how — a loon pair was suddenly, miraculously spotted in the Quabbin Reservoir, one of the largest inland bodies of water in Massachusetts. Loons began returning to the state. “And then, of course, there was the oil spill,” Savoy said.
In 2003, the Bouchard Barge Oil leak in Buzzards Bay , off the coast of New Bedford, killed hundreds of loons. But the tragedy came with a bittersweet silver lining: As a consequence of the oil spill, the company had to pay for environmental rehabilitation projects across Massachusetts, including ones that were underway since before the spill. “It took 15-plus years for that money to become available to put towards loon conservation,” Savoy said.
When it did, conservation work began in eastern Massachusetts. “With the success of that effort, we shifted to the Berkshires in 2022,” Savoy said. And that’s where Gregg comes in.
Field Biologist Thomas Gregg observes a loon guarding its nest on July 10. “I get a spreadsheet of all the lakes, ponds, reservoirs in the region I need to survey, separated into tiers,” Gregg, 26, explained from Otis Reservoir, one of dozens of waterbodies he monitors for loons. “Currently, I’m at a first-tier, high-priority lake: one in which we are aware of a loon mating pair.
” Hence the majestic black-and-white loon seated on an egg in a shoreline nest about 60 feet from his kayak. A loon guards its nest among the cattails in the Otis Reservoir on July 10. In one day alone, it’s not unusual for Gregg to visit six lakes.
“I go to second-tier bodies of water maybe once a month — a place where sometimes, occasionally we’ll see a loon,” he said. And when there’s spill-over time, he’ll check out third-tier lakes. “I’m going to every place a loon could potentially call home, and tracking the activity or lack of activity in those places,” he said.
“I don’t expect to see loons there, but you never know.” Gregg estimates 25 loons live in Berkshire County. “If there’s anyone who has an estimate, it’s me,” he said.
Scanning the perimeter of one lake usually takes an hour, and as the summer wears on, life can feel a little like "Groundhog Day" — repeat, repeat, repeat. But every August, Gregg is joined by four other biologists for the other leg of the Institute’s work here: introducing new loons to Berkshires waters. Through the Common Loon Translocation Project, the institute captures healthy wild loon chicks — mostly in Maine — and brings them to the Berkshires to start a new life.
“The reason we’re in the Berkshires is it has excellent habitat for loons: lots of lakes,” Savoy said. Traditionally, a loon spends its life in its “natal lake,” the body of water where it’s born. “Loons are homebodies, they have a hard time dispersing on their own,” Savoy said.
“So, when they establish themselves on a lake, they’ll generally come back, year after year.” If they’re brought from Maine to the Berkshires when they’re still babies — “before they’re cognizant of anything going on at all,” as Gregg put it — then they’ll recognize a Berkshires body of water as their natal lake. So in early summer, loon biologists in Maine — where there’s an estimated 1,700 pairs of loons — identify parents with multiple chicks; they want to make sure those parents will still have another baby to raise.
Once a loon is captured in Maine, it’s driven overnight to Massachusetts and released to one of five specially selected ponds in Berkshire County. If the loon is more mature, it’s released directly into the water. If it’s younger and more vulnerable, it’s kept alone in a pen until it’s able to feed and fend for itself.
“While there are chicks in the pen, we need to have a crew of at least two there at all times, from sunup to sundown, doing the feeds, visual assessments, making sure the loon chicks are doing okay,” Savoy said. Gregg, who lives in Lanesborough, is the only local in that crew. For the others, the institute rents a house — this year at Jiminy Peak in Hancock — for two months.
“We moved 11 chicks to the Berkshires in 2022, and another nine in 2023,” Savoy said. This summer, they’re hoping to move another 16. Slow and steady.
On a recent Thursday afternoon, Gregg gathered with the four biologists working with him through late October, exchanging homemade muffins — he gets a cranberry orange for a blueberry — by a Becket lake. “Alright, I’m going to Worcester,” said 23-year-old biologist Jack McCann. McCann planned to join Gregg to feed the three loon chicks currently penned up here in Becket.
But on the drive here, he got a call: There was a loon chick captured in Maine, and he had to come get it. He’d meet his Maine equivalent at a halfway point, a Worcester motel parking lot. “Sometimes cops watch us at 2 in the morning and think we’re transporting drugs,” McCann said.
But what they’re delivering is actually a tiny baby loon, in a hard plastic tote bin. Biologists Jack McCann, Autumn Heil, Jenna Brown and Thomas Gregg visit between shifts watching the young loons that will be released in the Berkshires on Aug. 22.
“It’s essentially suspended in a mesh hammock in a tote,” McCann said. Once he claims the loon, the two of them will road trip back to the Berkshires together. “You don’t play music or anything,” McCann said.
“You keep it quiet. You listen to the loon peck at the thing. The car smells like fish.
” The loon that McCann is getting tonight is a little older, so it’ll be a direct release. “We weigh it” — by putting a mesh bag on a hook scale — “check its wings” — for flight feather development — “get blood samples, put bands on” — for future tracking — “take it out of the tote, scoop it into the water, make sure it swims off, and that’s that,” McCann said. And he’s off to Worcester.
Gregg heads to feed the loons, taking off in an electric-powered tin boat. He spots a silhouette in the distance. “Is that a heron?” he asks.
“I’m actually not good with birds that aren’t loons.” He goes to a fish trap and gets the loons some food. The fish writhe between his fingers as he counts them out, 80 per loon.
Biologist Thomas Gregg gathers fresh food for the loons at Windsor Reservoir on Aug. 22. “Oh, a crawfish!” he says, spotting a little guy sharper than the others.
“I love that for the chicks because they’re calcium-rich.” Gregg approaches Pen One, where the loon is particularly vocal, as well as a little skittish. But that’s a good thing: a survival tactic.
“We want that trait to be preserved,” he says. Then, Gregg’s voice grows hushed as he draws nearer to the pen. “We try to minimize human exposure as much as possible.
We want them to think they’re fishing themselves, and to develop independent thinking skills,” he says, funneling the fish through a blind, unseen. He hides, peeking at the loon through a small hole as it dives below, enjoying lunch. Biologist Thomas Gregg peers at a young loon, hidden so as to not disturb its development.
In two weeks, when the loon is released, the crew will continue to monitor it from a distance. In mid-October, the non-locals will all go home. “But I’ll stick around to keep track of the loons until they leave for the ocean,” Gregg whispers.
A few days later, Gregg learned that this is the final year of the translocation project. "There's only so much funding available, it's a huge effort and takes a lot of work," Savoy said. "Also, we don't want to be transporting loons from Maine for too long: they have a very stable loon population.
" But for now, Gregg is in a tin boat on a Becket lake — imagining what the lake might look like decades from now, gazing at a loon chick on which that future partly lies. “I would like to see mating pairs of loons on bodies of water that do not have them,” he says. “There’s so much potential.
” A pause, he looks up. “This is what I’m doing with my life. I want to correct what humans have wrought on these loons.
To be a part of reviving the population back to its former glory.”.
