One sunny morning in mid-September, a truck crunched over gravel in a Boonville marshaling yard, a parking lot where National Grid keeps construction equipment used in rebuilding transmission lines.
The driver glimpsed something out of the corner of his eye and hit the brake. There, sitting in the middle of the lot, was a black bird with a pointed bill and fiery red eyes.
Is that -- a loon? the driver wondered.
He called the on-site environmental inspector, who in turn called National Grid's lead environmental scientist in Syracuse, J.R. Russo.
We've got a loon up here that can't fly, the inspector told Russo.
"There was no evidence that the bird was actually injured," Russo said. "It wasn't hit by someone on site. It was kind of moving his head back and forth, but not moving his whole body."
Russo's job is to help National Grid crews deal with animal encounters across the company's sprawling power grid infrastructure in accordance with environmental laws. Mostly that entails installing osprey nest platforms on utility poles.
"Because if they nest in the wrong spot on the pole, they can get electrocuted and catch on fire," Russo said. "The goal is to prevent that from happening."
Loons, however, are aquatic birds that nest on shorelines. Their mournful calls echoing across misty lakes are inseparable from scenes of North Country idyll.
So how did this unlucky loon become stranded in a heavy equipment parking lot?
When viewed from the perspective of a loon in flight, a 15-acre gravel parking lot surrounded by forest and meadow looks a lot like one of thousands of small ponds that dot the vast Adirondack landscape.
"Sometimes they'll mistake wet pavement, or maybe wet gravel, for open water when it gets darker with the rain," said Adirondack Center for Loon Conservation Research Biologist, Griffin Archambault. "But this loon just thought a dry gravel parking lot was a nice place to land."
Loons are supremely adapted to life in the water, Archambault said. They have dense bones and small wings, ideal for swimming, diving, and catching fish.
But their stubby wings and heavy bodies give loons the flight characteristics of an overloaded cargo plane with one bad engine. They make ducks look majestic.
"If you spook a duck, it jumps vertically out of the water and immediately takes off and flies away," Archambault said. "Loons need to run for several hundred feet, if not several hundred yards, across the water."
For this reason, loons must choose their landing zones wisely lest they get stuck on a small pond with a short runway.
And woe to the loon that mistakes a parking lot for a pond! The bird simply is not equipped with the type of running gear required to taxi even a few feet on dry land.
"Their legs are positioned very far back on their body and slightly turned out to the side, so they serve as amazing flippers to propel them through the water," Archambault said. "But they really can't walk on land. They just kind of shuffle around like a seal."
Archambault explained this to Russo and advised him to wait for an ACLC volunteer to arrive.
Judging by the loon's feisty demeanor, Archambault estimated that it wasn't marooned there for long. But the temperature that day was expected to reach 80 degrees, too hot for the bird to be left out in the open.
Someone covered the loon with a kiddie pool to protect it from the blazing sun. By the time the ACLC volunteer showed up, the loon had punched holes in the pool with its sharp, dagger-like bill.
"It's definitely a weapon," Archambault said. "And this is a pretty pissed off and aggressive loon."
Loons are fiercely territorial and protective of their young. They will sometimes stab each other through the sternum with their bills. A 2019 story in the Bangor Daily News quoted a wildlife biologist who'd found a dead bald eagle that had been speared in the heart by a loon protecting its chick.
"Luckily when it comes to humans, they tend to bite instead of stab," Archambault said. "Being bit doesn't feel great, but they also don't have teeth, so it's not the end of the world."
The ACLC volunteer, a retired forest ranger with more than 25 years of loon handling experience, bundled the bird into a blue recycling bin, suffering only a bite on the thumb for his trouble.
The loon's distinct black and white plumage marked it as an adult, at least three years old, Archambault estimated. It was banded and released on Second Pond outside Saranac Lake.
"It started preening right away," Archambault said. "It was taking dives and it was very happy to be back on the water, very happy to be back where the fish are."
Sometime in the next few weeks, after it's had a chance to recuperate, the loon will migrate for the winter to somewhere on the Atlantic coast between Maine and North Carolina.
That is, if it doesn't along the way mistake another parking lot for a pond.