I thought that my work with a species that was rare in southern Michigan could help it surivive. I'm not sure where this feeling came from. When I was younger I did spend a lot of time outside watching nature and always curious at how it worked. As I became older I discovered a lot of the questions I had could no longer be answered because of the way we treat the Earth. So I think there was a growing feeling that I needed to do something to help stop our assault on the World or at least slow it down to where we started working with it instead of against it.
Loons are an ideal species to observe since they spend all their time in the middle of a lake.
It does help to attend college, Patricia. A bachelor of science in ornithology or ecology will take you much farther toward a job studying something like loon migration. I only know one person that actually spends all of his time studying loon. Maybe you will be the second. It is a lot of fun to come up with a question and actually follow through with it.