Patience Has Its Reward in Tracking Loons

John Toppenberg silently inches his inflatable raft toward the loon and its chick, veering left to approach them from an angle on the spruce-lined lake.

The large diving birds bob on the glassy water, unperturbed as the Zodiac glides closer. Eight feet away, Toppenberg stops and slowly points his lens at them. “Hello, baby, how are you?” he coos.

Ignoring him, the adult loon plunges into the water, disappearing for a full minute before emerging with a leech for junior. Toppenberg peers into the camera as the chick gulps down the wiggly treat, but he doesn’t push the shutter. He’s captured that scene--and others equally as intimate--countless times.

Toppenberg, a retired major-crimes detective, shares a privileged association with the family of common loons that lives on the lake behind his Sterling home, filling the air with a repertoire of haunting calls. Earning their trust hasn’t come easily. For five years, he has cultivated a nonthreatening relationship with the male and female pair that return each spring to breed on the secluded property he calls Loon Lake.

“I let them get used to me, let them tell me when it was OK to get closer until they became comfortable with me in their world,” he says. “I view myself as a visitor and I try to be respectful of their world.”

As a result, Toppenberg’s photographs document private moments among the enigmatic red-eyed birds: a parent carrying a hatchling on its back, a baby left alone among the water lilies, mom and dad playing tag. The photos offer glimpses of a solitary species known to live up to 30 years.

“John is getting shots most people could never hope to get--unless they have the same patience,” says Nick Fucci, president of the Alaska Society of Outdoor and Nature Photographers, which has hosted slide presentations in Anchorage of Toppenberg’s loons. “He does fabulous loons. They swim right up to his boat.”

All five loon varieties nest in Alaska, which has seen their numbers decline in Anchorage and surrounding regions as people encroach on their territories. In that portion of the state, the common loon population dropped from an estimated 6,000 birds in 1977 to 4,500 in 1997, according to Tamara Mills, a loon specialist with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. During that same period, the numbers of Pacific loons fell from 8,000 to 5,700.

Elsewhere in the state, the numbers remained fairly stable for common, Pacific, arctic and yellow-billed loons, although there’s been a 43% decline of red-throated loons, primarily in tundra areas. Mills said scientists are investigating the phenomenon but don’t yet know why the numbers dropped so dramatically.

Toppenberg, 56, first encountered the shy birds in 1996, when he and his wife, Peggy Conway, settled in the Kenai Peninsula community of 4,700. Photography had long been a stress outlet for his job as a detective with the Larimer County Sheriff’s Department in Fort Collins, Colo.

During a 22-year career in law enforcement, he shot crime scenes and documented wilderness experiences. Then Conway, a nurse midwife, got a job in Sterling, prompting Toppenberg’s retirement and the move north.

That first summer, the loons were predictably skittish, diving when Toppenberg got within 100 yards. The next two summers, he gradually got closer in a canoe, but that proved unsteady for photography. Since then, he has relied on the Zodiac, stable and quiet, its battery-powered motor barely making a ripple.

“I always approach at oblique angles and I always use slow and deliberate motions around them,” Toppenberg says. “They react to eagles and other loons, but they do not react to me. They sleep within 15 feet of my boat.”

These days, the loons even leave their young unattended near his raft. “I feel very honored that they trust me as a baby-sitter,” he says.

That familiarity worries Nancy Fair, a biologist with the Fish and Wildlife Service. Such close-ups might encourage less principled shooters, says Fair, who ran the Alaska Fish and Game Departments loon conservation program for 15 years. Other photographers have captured loons doing the “penguin dance”--wings flapping water in great distress. But the birds’ anxiety is triggered by people getting too close.

“I have not seen that in John’s work. He is a benign presence,” Fair says. “My concern is the unethical professionals and the amateurs who don’t know any better. But the best photos take the kind of patience and knowledge that John has.”

Like clockwork, Toppenberg’s favorite subjects return each May when the ice recedes enough to allow the long runways they need for landings. They depart in the fall for coastal waters where they winter.

Each year they lay one or two eggs, hatching at least one chick. In the five years since Toppenberg has been capturing their images on film, all of the chicks survived except for one that was snatched by an eagle. It happened days after the unusually assertive bird followed Toppenberg back to shore. He had to ferry it across the lake to its parents, he says, wincing.

He still feels the loss as if it had been his own child.

“I’ve been accused of being anthropomorphic, attributing human characteristics to animals,” he says, scanning the lake for his loons. “Well, I’m guilty as charged--and unrepentant.”