As we reported earlier, nine Common Loons from Minnesota and Wisconsin were fitted with radio transmitters in late summer. Two of the birds were captured on lakes near Collegeville, the other seven in northern Wisconsin. The U.S. Geological Survey is running the monitoring program as part of an avian disease study. The daily records document loon movements.

One of the Minnesota loons was found dead in Wisconsin on Aug. 26. The second Minnesota bird arrived on Lake Michigan in October, and on Thanksgiving Day was on the lake north of Chicago.

One Wisconsin bird has not been heard from for almost six weeks. Two others are on Lake Michigan near Chicago as of Nov. 25. A fourth bird reported from southern Illinois on Nov. 25. A fifth was moving through Tennessee on Nov. 25, and the signal from the final member of this "team" came from Virginia, on or near the Atlantic coast, also on the 25th.

Atlantic coastal waters off Virginia is one place our Common Loons spend the winter, the other site being Gulf of Mexico waters near off the Alabama and Florida coasts.

In a similar study in 1998, loons from Minnesota and Wisconsin staged on Lake Michigan and Lake Erie. They followed one of two distinct migration routes to wintering waters One moved south through Illinois Kentucky, Tennessee, and Alabama to the Gulf. The second swung through Ohio, West Virginia, Virginia, and South Carolina to Atlantic waters.

You can track the 2010 birds as they migrate at the U.S. Geologial Survey web site, http://www.umesc.usgs.gov/terrestrial/migratory_birds/loons/migrations.html

The Common Loon in the photo was found on a Minnesota lake last year.