Chesapeake Almanac

from October 2021

Water World

inspired, and learn how we got to where we are today, not with guilt but with understanding,” Henry added. Bruce Glover, director of community initiatives and special education, says that along with the ability to draw on his years as an educator in that field, he is inspired by the museum’s sense of beauty, spirituality, and the stories of the community. “It reminds me of scenes from my own childhood,” he reminisces with a smile. In the end, he says, “it proves that we’re all alike; we all are one.”

Looking ahead to the future, plans include a new museum in the nearby community of Bellevue, as well as a proposal to make the Water’s Edge Museum a regional history field trip. According to Henry, “the more we talk about it, the more we make it real. You shouldn’t learn any history before you learn where you’re from.”

For more information visit the Water’s Edge Museum at watersedgemuseum.org.

This hopeful lithograph depicts Black, Latino, and Native men and women breaking bonds of servitude.

Niambi Davis was raised on the Eastern Shore of Maryland and takes every opportunity to share her love of the Land of Pleasant Living through words and pictures.

The Loon in Winter

A healthy Chesapeake has far-reaching effects.

by John Page Williams

Say “loon,” and people tend to think of coldwater lakes and ponds left behind across northern North America as the glaciers receded at the end of the last Ice Age. On waters like those, loon pairs in elegant, tuxedo-like blackand-white plumage mate and raise their young on floating nests of grasses and sedges at the edges of marshes. A family of four loons may eat 900 pounds of small fish like yellow perch over a breeding season. Thus, they separate from other loon pairs, spreading out their territories to ensure adequate food supply.

I got a very different picture of these birds one chilly late-fall afternoon some 50 years ago with Reedville’s legendary Wallace Lewis, a highline menhaden captain turned soft crabber and charter skipper. Captain Wallace had invited me to fish the open Bay and the mouth of the Potomac with some of his friends aboard his 42foot boat, Hiawatha. The plan was to look for gulls diving on baitfish and jig for the rockfish driving the bait to the surface. As a much younger student of the Chesapeake, I was anxious to make a good impression, so I climbed up onto the flybridge with a pair of binoculars while everyone else clustered around the kerosene heater in the wheelhouse. Sure enough, a flock appeared about

Loons feed constantly throughout autumn to hold themselves over during their winter molt, when they cannot swim or fly.

halfway between Smith Point and Point Lookout. I bounded down the ladder with the information and Wallace shoved the big boat’s throttles forward. When we arrived, the gulls were still diving, and Hiawatha’s big commercial sounder showed both bait and apparent fish marks, but our jigs went untouched. Instead, what we saw was a group of 30-some streamlined gray, tan, and white birds diving continuously into the ball of young menhaden and driving them to the surface. They were loons, in their unfamiliar-looking winter plumage. Ever the gentleman, Wallace thanked me for pointing out the gulls but said, “I was afraid they were diving on loons instead of rockfish.” We never found the rock that day, but we saw several more rafts of loons apparently resting after feeding.

In northern lakes of the United States and Canada, loons exploit an ecological niche: Since they are warm-blooded, their metabolisms operate at higher rates than the lakes’ cold-blooded fish, which are dependent on water temperature for body heat. Thus, they become effective underwater fishers. In addition, adult loons face few natural predators there. However, they have had to adapt to winter, when the lakes are frozen.

Campbell’s has your dream boat.

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When buying or selling a boat, think of Campbell’s.

They learned to migrate to ice-free coastal environments, molting many of their striking body feathers to turn gray-brown on the head and back with white throat and underbody.

Their presence along the Pacific, Gulf of Mexico, and Atlantic coasts begins this month, including on the Chesapeake. They come through here in the fall to feed on schools of “peanut” (young-of-the-year) and year-old menhaden, croakers, and spot that are leaving the Bay to winter along the coast and out on the continental shelf. During January and February, the loons go through a three-week molt to renew their flight feathers. They need to spend this flightless period close to ample stocks of fish.

For many years, ornithologists thought loons were monogamous, staying with the same mates year after year, but recent tagging studies show that males are instead “territoryfaithful.” They tend to winter closer to their home lakes, e.g., on the coast of New England, to get a springtime jump on rivals in reclaiming favored lake space. Their mates move further south, to the mid-Atlantic. “Our” loons appear to come from both interior New England and Ontario.

The loons are descended from ancient birds that left life on land tens of millions of years ago to become almost completely aquatic. Their bones grew nearly solid, to aid in diving. Their feathers are dense and low in oil, which also helps in diving, as well as insulating against heat loss underwater. Watch them on the water. They sit low, like submarines, and slip below the surface without ripples. Their lungs work very efficiently, and there is some genetic evidence that their blood hemoglobin holds oxygen especially well for time underwater. Finally, their legs are set far back on their bodies, with large, webbed feet driven by powerful muscles anchored in the pelvic girdle.

It sounds like loons should be able to walk upright like us—but no, they are almost helpless on land. Instead, those strong legs and big feet drive them like fish underwater, aided by keen eyesight. They can dive as deep as 200 feet and stay down for more than a minute, but such effort is seldom energy efficient. That day in the mouth of the Potomac with Wallace Lewis, they were in 40 feet of water, but the baitfish were just under the surface. 