Migrating Yellow-billed Loon Pays Rare Visit to Case Inlet

A beast appeared from the high Arctic, just down the peninsula from my home. A chance like this may only come once or twice in life, so I’m back at the Herron Island ferry landing. Yesterday I tried and failed to see the beast. My eye is again fused to my spotting scope.

Gray sky, gray shifting waves. Dark distant shapes. I sift through scoters, cormorants, buffleheads, horned grebes, pigeon guillemots, and maybe ten common loons, which have donned their iconic breeding plumage, jet black spangled with white.

And then there it is, among the muted glare of offshore waves, still mostly winter gray, tough to see when it appears between dives. The yellow-billed loon.

It takes a skilled eye to pick out a rarity like this. A little soothsaying doesn’t hurt either. Brandon Lloyd of Lakebay found it two days earlier. He had brought his family to visit the ospreys that nest on the ferry dock gantry. He told me he had noticed congregations of loons here in the past and wondered if it was a likely place for lightning to strike. He said to his family, “All right, let’s go check up on the ospreys and find a yellow-billed or an Arctic loon while we’re at it.”

For a few hours, they watched the ospreys fish and mate and chase off eagles. As they were leaving, he did a final scan of the seabirds. That’s when he saw it.

“My adrenaline went through the roof,” Lloyd said. “I was shaking. I had my wife and daughter take a look while I tried to get photos to confirm. It was hard to sleep that night after that.

“The bird is special to me because it shows how making it a point to go out, rain or shine, and enjoy nature with yourself, your friends, or your family can lead to all kinds of surprises. Though ospreys aren’t a rarity, we have loved watching the pair. The yellow-billed loon was just a bonus.”

Charlie Wright of Tacoma, a member of the Washington Bird Records Committee, said it is only the fourth time a yellow-billed loon has been recorded in Pierce County, most recently in 2007.

For an hour, I give the loon my undivided attention. It is just off the north end of Herron Island when I pick it up, out in mid-channel. It moves slowly north until it is level with me.

Maybe it’s just the memories that come flooding in, of basalt shorelines on the windswept Bering Sea island where I first saw yellow-billed loons, in freezing salt spray alongside eiders, but I could swear that every detail of this bird’s body speaks of life diving under sea ice, rubbing shoulders with polar bears. Its frosty thick neck. The snow-white speckles across its back. A bony lump above its brow, giving it a prehistoric profile. And that ivory-hued spear of a bill.

It lifts itself to shake out its feathers. The heft of its body is apparent. It makes the common loons, normally such impressive birds, look svelte.

A yellow-billed loon weighs up to 14 pounds. Loons have solid bones, whereas most birds have hollow bones. They are aquatic animals first, aerial second, and need a long runway and a lot of foot-thrashing to get airborne. The name loon has uncertain origins. It may come from an Old Norse word referring to cormorants and guillemots, or it may be related to lummox, slang for an awkward person. It may also come from the Scandinavian word lum, meaning lame or clumsy. And loons are awkward and clumsy on land. Their feet are set far back on their bodies, the better for diving, almost penguin-like but without the corresponding vertical alignment of spine to make walking comfortable.

In Europe, they are called divers, not loons, a name that honors their comfort zone. They ride low in the water. All birds must replace their feathers at least once a year, and loons are so comfortable in the water that they employ a molt strategy that would be death to most birds. They lose all their flight feathers at once, in late winter before migration, and for a month are flightless as they float and dive.

To regulate their buoyancy, loons begin a dive by breathing out and compressing their feathers to expel any air bubbles. I notice something about the yellow-billed loon’s dives. Every time it shoots forward, bill-first, it kicks its legs and flops, creating a double-splash that is visible a mile away. It’s so consistent, the awkward splash, that it makes me laugh.

Do common loons do that? I try to think. I pan over and find a few and watch them slide underwater with hardly a jump or a ripple. No splash at all.

Back on the yellow-billed loon, I decide to time a dive. The herky-jerky double-splash comes, and I check the second hand on my watch. I wait. Eventually, I start to wonder if I have lost the loon. Then, after 115 seconds, it pops to the surface.

It is working the far edge of a stripe of lighter water in the middle of Case Inlet. Such stripes represent the tidal convergence of two masses of water. One mass may be colder, saltier, or less turbid than the other, or all three. Where things converge, life often concentrates.

The next dive lasts 125 seconds. Then 115 seconds. Then 120 seconds, 120 seconds, 120 seconds. The consistency is remarkable.

Loons are visual hunters. The yellow-billed loon does a reverse-periscope move I see common loons doing all the time. It peers underwater before diving. Loons mostly eat fish with the occasional crustacean or marine worm thrown in. The roof of a loon’s mouth has rear-facing spikes to help it hold on to slippery food

The yellow-billed loon is the largest of Earth’s five loon species, and the least numerous. It breeds in remote parts of the Arctic, including in far northern Russia. In northern Alaska, it is estimated that 90% of nesting yellow-billed loons are in the National Petroleum Reserve. Three types of loons regularly spend the winter in the Salish Sea: common loon, Pacific loon, and red-throated loon.

Shockingly, the day after I spend my hour with the yellow-billed loon and write up my notes from the field, Wright pays it a visit and spies, south of Herron Island, a second yellow-billed loon. To have the county’s fourth and fifth records of such a rare species in one place at one time is, in his words, “just amazing.”