On a busy day, the corner of YouTube run by the New Hampshire’s Loon Preservation Committee gets hundreds of visitors.
Viewers come for the close-up views of loons: striking black and white feathers, ruby red eyes. But they stay for the drama, as the birds mate, lay eggs and protect their nests. And the day everyone’s waiting for, when a chick hatches.
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The loon cam has an enthusiastic fandom. But the channel has humble beginnings. A decade ago, it started sort of as a science project, in an effort to figure out why almost half of loon eggs don’t end up hatching.
“Sometimes these things fail in the blink of an eye. And so unless you have somebody who's watching that loon nest at the instant a wave crashes over that nest, or a gull or an eagle comes down and snatches the egg, you're often just not going to know,” said Harry Vogel, the head of the Loon Preservation Committee.
The committee was started in 1975, as loon populations were plummeting. The birds were facing new challenges as humans built dams and vacation homes, and warmed up the atmosphere.
The committee does research and raises money. They help loons escape from icy lakes, if they don’t migrate fast enough. And they put out dozens of pre-made nests every year for loons to use if they can’t build one of their own.
“We are essentially trying to right a wrong that we have done to our loons,” Vogel said.
The loon live streams have helped add to biologists’ understanding of the birds for a decade. Anecdotes pile up over the years, showing different facets of loon behavior. The microphones have picked up cooing noises not previously recognized as loon sounds.
But Vogel says the birds are also a powerful force for conservation. They get people to care. In part, that’s because their calls are hard to forget.
“Then you add a little chick riding up on the back of a parent, and you've hooked a fair proportion of your human population,” he said.
Vogel says his team figured, if they were already filming the loons, they might as well share the livestreams with the public. But running a loon cam is hard work.
Enter: Bill Gassman.
About ten years ago, a Loon Preservation Committee biologist recruited Gassman to help out while he was working at a lobster festival. After a 40-year career in technology, he figured he’d be able to help out.
Now, in his retirement, he spends May through July fixated on loons: one eye on the birds, and another on the fast-moving YouTube chat. When chicks are hatching, he’s especially glued to the stream.
“I can't not watch at all times because I might miss something. You never know when something's going to happen,” he said.
Gassman’s dedication to his volunteer job as loon cam operator, or L-C-O as he’s affectionately called by viewers, is intense. The birds are the first thing he thinks about when he wakes up.
“The light starts at 4:00. I usually check it to see what's going on, and I keep it really close overnight in case something attacks an egg. So I’ll usually pull the camera back and go back to sleep,” he said with a laugh.
Gassman controls the loon cam – a security camera attached to a post in the water – with his laptop or phone. He’s skipped parties to attend to loon cam duties, pulled over while driving to catch a big moment, even run the loon cam from the audience at a wedding.
His devotion to the loons extends to his tech setup. He’s fine-tuning it year after year, often to protect it from wildlife. A goose pecked a microphone to death, so now the mics are protected. This year, a bear was suspected of unplugging power cords. Turtles have chewed through cables several times.
“We're going to put the microphone cable inside a garden hose next year,” he said. “So it's going to have to chew through that first.”
Gassman says he didn’t know loons that well before his retirement gig. But watching them so closely every summer, he gets why they have so many fans.
“They're mystical, right? They're prehistoric. They were around when the dinosaurs were around. They're beautiful birds. The closer you look, you see how intricate they are,” he said. “The sounds are very haunting.”
He knows of people in New York City who turn on the livestream when they go to sleep, to drift off to the sounds of the lake. Viewers on different time zones leave notes in the chat about what happened overnight.
A small community of viewers – chatters, as they call themselves – come back year after year. And they’re not just fellow YouTube travelers. They’re friends.
Carol Horn DiLernia is one of them. Her family knows her as a loon fanatic. Other livestream viewers know her by her screen name, Tailfeather. She reads about loons, researches them, and loves to talk to other people about their behavior.
“We bounce things off of one another. We think out loud on the cam. And if I do that at a cocktail party, people will walk away from me, you know,” she said with a laugh.
She’s been watching since the cam’s early days. She watches all kinds of livestreams – red tailed hawks, ospreys. She had an eagle cam phase. But the loons are always on.
Seeing the chicks hatch is a treat, but Horn DiLernia says she also likes to watch the birds bonding and sitting on their eggs.
Often it’s not so idyllic. Eagles attack. Loons accidentally crush their own eggs, or sometimes they abandon them, if they don’t seem viable. This year, out of four eggs in the two nests being live streamed, only one chick hatched.
Horn DiLernia says she tries not to attribute human characteristics to the birds. But she does connect to them.
“I feel for them deeply,” she said. “I also find that they do their grieving process, and then it's another day and they pick up where they left off.”
In the chat, Horn DiLernia is something like an unofficial moderator, especially when the chicks are hatching. That's when the chat gets newcomers, and sometimes on YouTube, she says, people make uninformed observations.
“That’s all you need for a group that doesn’t really know what’s going on, and then panic ensues. And it's like, ‘Stop it!’” she said.
But ultimately, viewers seem to respect her interpretation of what they’re seeing on the cam. And that’s part of why she stays.
“I think it's important for everybody to champion something. I think that that's what part of life is, is being a champion to something or someone,” she said. “I think that that's what I try to do on the cam. I try to give people the education that they're looking for when they come.”
The loon cam is over for the season. But next spring, the loons will come back. And, unaware they’re being watched, they’ll give another show for their fans.
