When I remember the call of the loon, I’m thinking specifically of the wail, which is actually only one of its four distinct calls — the others being the yodel, the tremolo and the hoot. The yodel is a series of rising high pitches, not unlike a car alarm, which male loons make by jutting out their necks. It registers fear or danger or anger. The tremolo is a brief crazy laugh — loony — used to register intrusions into territory or the loon’s own presence: “Pay attention,” it says. The hoot is a short, delicate sound meant for nearby family, a soft “c’mere.” The wail is a pitch that rises and falls, an interval that falls off. The wail serves as long distance communication between mating pairs. It’s the sound of nature longing. As if the loons were trying to share something, not necessarily with us, but with the lakes themselves. It is a “here I am.” Here I am. Here I am.

The sound is there, and it has always been there. The loon is part of an ancient lineage of living birds — at least 55 million years old — and all five species are part of a primitive order found in the fossil record beside mastodons and sabre-toothed tigers. The loon was making the call you hear before great apes had evolved for us to evolve from. The call of the loon makes the puniness of the mere 300,000 years of Homo sapiens apparent. The sound was waiting for us, for you, from the beginning and before the beginning. 

That balance is now under threat. Birds Canada recently used 40 years of volunteer data from its Canadian Lakes Loon Survey to look at the “mysterious declines” in what it calls “loon productivity” — that is, the number of young that loons produce which survive beyond six weeks. They found the number of common loon chicks raised to independence has declined by 1.4 per cent per year since the survey began, and if these trends continue, it’s likely the overall population will start to fall. This echoes the results of a 27-year study out of northern Wisconsin that found common loon fledgling success declined by 26 per cent, with the overall adult population dropping by 22 per cent. One theory that explains these declines posits a combination of acidity and mercury in the lake water, plus climate warming. It’s likely that other factors, as yet to be uncovered, are also at play. Both surveys force us to confront the possibility of loonless lakes; they would be sadder, lonelier places. 

Loons are gregarious; they come up right beside the boat or the dock, sometimes curiously, sometimes indifferently, but never as a threat or as a victim. Loons aren’t afraid of us, and we’re not afraid of them. Perhaps that is why their call feels so companionable. Anyone who has been visited by a loon in the early morning mist on a lake has felt a fellowship of time and place. The loon has a life cycle familiar to the cottager it encounters, spending the winter surviving on the rough oceans of the wider world, then summering in the calm lakes of the enclosed interior. The change of location changes its eyes. Brown on the ocean turns red in the interior.

Loons have distinctly loonlike habits and ways of being. Simply put, they aren’t like other birds. They are even more foreign to us than other species. The loon has not evolved pneumatic bones, the hollow structures that make flying easier. A loon’s bones are heavy, allowing it to dive. In the world of lakes, it goes between landscapes. It is a creature of the air. It is an underwater creature. It nests in the reeds. It goes everywhere. Whenever we happen to encounter loons, usually in pairs, bobbing on the surface of the lake, they are at a crossroads, in between one environment and another. The loon’s eye sees from every perspective what we see from one.