Web page for Arctic Landscape Conservation Cooperative
Vulnerability assessment fact-sheet for Yellow-billed Loon.
The Yellow-billed loon, the largest of the worldâs five loon species, and also the rarest, has one of the highest nesting densities in the world on the central Arctic Coastal Plain of Alaska (Earnst et al. 2005). In Alaska, this species typically breeds on the edges of relatively deep (>2 m), large (usu. >12 ha) fish-bearing lakes (http://alaska.fws.gov/). Little is known about their diet in Alaska, but they are believed to depend on several fish species, with cisco (Coregonus spp.) being the most important (J. Schmutz, pers. comm.). Although previously thought to winter off the coast of the Pacific Northwest, new evidence suggests the North American breeding population winters in East Asia from the western Kuril Islands to the Yellow Sea (J. Schmutz et al., unpublished data). Earnst et al. (2005) estimates that <1000 nesting pairs breed in n. Alaska.