46 degrees Clear Wind Calm
Sunrise 5:43 am CDT Sunset 8:35 pm CDT
“Good Morning from Lake Wobegon, Minnesota. Where all the women are strong, all the men are good-looking and all the LOONS are above average!”
This definitely IS a “Simon Says day” in so many ways!
It is an absolutely beautiful Minnesota spring morning here on Loon Lake!
The lake is a stunning sky blue with just the hint of a few zephyrs of breezes forming small ripples on some parts of the lake. But around the loon nest itself it is like a perfect mirror reflecting a perfect loon sitting on a perfect nest with 2 perfect eggs under him!
The rising sun paints shafts of blinding light shimmering off the calm surface of the water.
And all is well with the world.
Last night at 12:21 am CDT our female loon had the delivery of her second egg!
There was very little fanfare or signs of the miracle that was about to unfold. If you blinked, you missed it! (Like I did with the first egg!)
The whole thing took only 4 minutes from her first “rising up and pushing” to the actual emergence of the egg.
If you want to watch the whole miracle happen, you can go to http://www.ustream.tv/recorded/121896042 to watch the whole miraculous event.
The female first rises up at the 1:44:00 time stamp on the video and the egg pops free at 1:48:24.
Four minutes of wonder.
Loon researchers of not that many years ago could never dream of seeing what you can now see in the comfort of your home or school at any time you want to view it.
In fact, many have said that until the LoonCam first showed a loon laying an egg and recorded it some 14 or 15 years ago, no one had ever recorded the actual laying of a loon egg. Or maybe even seeing it happen live. All researchers ever knew was that yesterday or a couple days ago there was no egg on the nest and now there is one. They never or seldom knew when it had actually happened.
But YOU can know exactly when it happened and you can actually see it happening.
Something that we could never do before.
It is an amazing gift that we have.
So now we settle in for the next 4 weeks for “loon chick watch”. That magical miraculous moment when we see the adult loon on the nest “twitching” as an impossibly cute loon chick makes its way out from within the confines of its egg.
And then the time is so fleeting that we get to see the chick before it jumps in the water within a day or so and disappears off into the big wide world of the lake. From then on it is a water bird.
So enjoy these wonderful, miraculous days as we wait for the chicks.
Days no doubt filled with wonder and drama and peace and heart stopping excitement.
Copyright 2019 Larry R Backlund