Call of the Loon

An Apostle Islands postcard

I had already cut the engine in the nameless bay when I saw it: the first loon of the season, a moment that always makes me smile. To see a loon - the chessboard of its plumage, the saphire of its eyes - is a kind of feathered joy. But to hear one, that is the true gift.

There is no sound like it in all of nature. Or perhaps I should say sounds, for a loon commonly makes four different kinds of calls: the territorial “yodel”; the laugh or “tremolo” often made in flight, the simple “hoot.” But it is with its other call, known as the “wail” that the loon transforms a simple moment on a northern lake into a moment of magic.

Writer John McPhee desribed it best. “The cry is made with the neck stretched forward, and it is a sound that seems to have come up a tube from an unimaginably deep source--hardly from a floating bird. It is a high, resonant, single unvaried tone that fades at the end toward a lower register. It has caused panic, because it has been mistaken for the cry of a wolf, but it is far too ghostly for that. It is detached from the earth. The Cree believed that it was the cry of a dead warrior forbidden entry to Heaven. The Chippewa heard it as an augury of death. Whatever it may portend, it is the predominant sound in this country. Every time the loon cry comes, it sketches its own surroundings--a remote lake under stars so bright they whiten clouds, a horizon jagged with spruce.”

To hear the wail of a loon is to know that there is more to the world than the human mind could ever know or understand, and to be content with the existence of mystery. It is a sound shaped like the moon rising, mists tangling over a nameless backwater. The sweet sorrow of loneliness half-remembered in the dark of night.

To see a loon makes you smile. To hear one can make you feel less alone.

— Jeff Rennicke (all photography by the author unless otherwise noted).

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