LOONY TUNES
“Music is the vapor of art. It is to poetry what reverie is to thought, what fluid is to solid, what the ocean of clouds is to the ocean of waves.”
Victor Hugo
Much has been written about the loon and more elegantly than I can ever hope to express. I can but set down what the loon means to me. My experience with the wildernesses of the world has spanned more than sixty years and while most of that exposure has been to the wilds of North America, it has also been spent in such habitats as the jungles of South America, Australia and other far eastern regions of Oceania, the dry but certainly not barren environments of the Arctic, the Mexican desert, the Australian outback and the high Andean plains, as well as the extreme mountainous environment of those same Andean mountains.
In reflecting on how the natural world has imprinted itself on me, I am necessarily guided by the five senses of sight, smell, taste, touch and sound that govern the human existence. While they all have influenced that recall, perhaps none has been more striking than sound in establishing the imagery that defines the mysteries of the natural world, a world governed by the scientific laws of nature yet whose boundaries remain blurred by what we know not nor understand, and perhaps to some degree may never fully comprehend. While Einstein and others have helped to sharpen this blur with their concepts of the fourth dimension of unity of spacetime, in the autumn of my life I still plod on bounded by three dimensional Euclidian concepts of separate time, space and motion. Therefore should I be compelled to define the single phenomenon that summarizes the great expanse of the natural world, it would not be that of spacetime or other esoteric concepts, at least to me, but rather that of sound and more specifically the haunting, mesmerizing call of the loon. It matters not that this water bird is only found in North America and nowhere else. Its call symbolizes all that is solitude and wild. The only comparison that is analogous is the equally haunting sound of pan pipes filtering through the mists from an unseen shepherd anchoring his flock on the steep slopes of an Andean mountainside, and as related in a chapter entitled “The Watcher’s Pipe”, to be published in this blog at a future date. Perhaps their sounds, both steeped in common science, are fourth dimension calls echoing unseen through the cosmos of the intangible mind, their sense and sensation defying common language and understanding.
It seems to me that the Creator, perhaps with too much work on hand, stumbled slightly when it came to the loon. Or perhaps the loon in its present form is just a work in progress on its way to a polished, finished product. For as presently constituted I think the loon was meant to be not a bird but some sort of water creature. As a bird it sits heavy in the water, its neck and head poking up like a periscope from an unseen hull. To gain flight it needs a runway-length lake, running into the wind on the surface for as much as several hundred metres to gain flight. Once airborne the loon is a laboured flier, its highly curved, heavily beating wings seemingly barely able to sustain flight, although it can average up to 120 kilometres per hour in the air. As though possessing vertigo, the loon rarely flies higher than the minimum height necessary to clear treetops on its way from one lake to another. The hollow bones of most birds are an important feature of their avian abilities. The loon on the other hand has many solid bones that while an aid to its diving ability, are an obstacle to effortless flight. With legs set far back on its body as an aid to streamlining flight and manoeuvring underwater, the land is definitely not a comfortable environment for this bird, as its chest dragging, shuffling waddle readily attests. Resting motionless on the water for long periods of time and sleeping over deeper portions of a lake away from predators, loons spend as little time on land as possible. Such time is restricted to their solitary nesting periods. Even then, nests are built as close to water as possible with the best sites being completely surrounded by water, such as on an island, muskrat house, half-submerged log, or sedge mat—a clump of grass-like water plants.
Should the normal two eggs laid in June survive, brown-black, down covered chicks will make their appearance by month’s end. Immediate swimmers on hatching, the chicks also spend a good deal of time as hitchhikers on their parents’ backs in order to rest, conserve heat and avoid predators. By migration time, the chicks have become self sufficient and soon follow their parents to their mainly non-breeding winter quarters, the latter being both coasts of North America in addition to the Gulf of Mexico. Although there are five species of the loon, including the Red-throated, Pacific, Arctic, Yellow-billed and Common Loon, it is the latter that is best known, its breeding range lying across most of Canada. With its summer “foliage” of a black and white checkerboard back, glossy black head, white belly and wing lining and characteristic white necklace around the throat, the deeply orange-eyed loon is striking and distinctive in appearance.
Fish being the loon’s main source of sustenance, it is to the former’s environment that a loon must turn in order to survive. It is therefore when the loon decides to pursue a lake’s subsurface that its true abilities truly surface, if you’ll pardon the mixed metaphor. In a word, the loon is an Olympian diver and swimmer. With many solid bones to reduce buoyancy, a head that can be held directly in line with the neck during diving to reduce drag, and legs that have powerful muscles for swimming, the loon is admirably suited to spending time underwater. During dives, the large webbed feet provide all of the propulsion and the wings are held tight unless they are used to help make sharp turns while chasing prey. Diving up to 80 metres, the loon can remain submerged for close to one minute.
My exposure to loons has been principally, although not exclusively, to the so-called Common Loon. Beyond the characteristics noted above, there is perhaps nothing more distinctive and fascinating about the Common Loon than the distinctive vocals of a variable voice that ranges through four distinct calls, being the tremolo, hoot, wail and yodel. It is the latter two that are perhaps most familiar and haunting in their rendition. Although loons may call at any time of day, it is perhaps their night chorusing that best epitomizes the music for which they have become so revered. Particularly special is the yodel given only by the male, and featuring a long, rising call with repetitive notes in the middle, and often stretching over five seconds or so. It is the effect of that and the loon’s other calls on me that I find so hard to describe. It is analogous to the struggle to comprehend a fourth dimension, and having conceived it, to then express that conception in everyday language.
Less complex however have been occasions when the large number of loons on a campsite lake created a cacophony of sound so intense as to keep me awake through the night. Steadfast in my love of them, I nonetheless wished at times that their nights be spent more in slumber like those I wished to have.
On another occasion I was running traverses out of a lakeside fly camp. My helper was a young aborigine. A cheerful, hard worker, both eager and willing, his bush craft at that juncture of his life however was probably not much better than my own. It was therefore to my chagrin and horror, but frankly mixed with some curiosity, that I was proudly presented with a supper of boiled loon that had somehow fallen victim to the enthusiasm of my young bush helper. Unsurprisingly for a bird whose principal food source was fish, the loon not only tasted horrible but was of a toughness that made aching jaws in the attempt to consume it. Fortunately the bushman was as equally unimpressed with his catch as was I, so that little persuasion was required to convince him of no future loon meals.
During my time in the bush, the primeval calls of loons produced a strange and contradictory dichotomy, particularly after an extensive period without respite from the isolation that sooner or later pervades one’s being during bush life. Prolonged isolation can produce aberrant behaviours in a person, be it to dull the senses, distort and twist reality, diminish logic and common sense, or alter patterns of normal communication. In contradiction on the other hand, I have found that a certain amount of isolation in the wilderness serves to sharpen and simplify the senses, hone perception, purify the mind and cast away the clutter of urban life. From an urban perspective that rarely lifts beyond the straight ahead, reality becomes the surrealism of a wilderness sky of stars so numerous they obscure the obsidian of the night in the brilliant carpet of light they lay across the heavens. This sky is no wedge of urban presumption and pulchritude tacked between vapid concrete spires of secular homage, but is instead a jubilant, expanding universe reaching for infinity. Shooting stars arc across the vastness on their path to material oblivion and a return to an atomic state. The static noise of the city becomes filtered and purified in the wild, quickly fading to oblivion, substituted by the sound of water lapping shores with the gentle murmurings of an intimacy, punctuated only by the strident cacophony of chirping beetles breaking the stillness of the night. Northern Lights whirl across the sky in a vibrant dance of veils, hissing and crackling like malevolent crones.
The concept of universe is one of past, present and future in a unity of spacetime too complex for my puny being to comprehend. However, the bridge that spans the complexity of such a universe I can never hope to ever know or understand, somehow and for reasons beyond my capacity to express, becomes manifest in the wail of a loon, shuddering through the night from some unknown omni directional source, carried on the waves of the ether, echoing from shore to shore and tree to tree before ricocheting into the vastness of the unknown that is eternal.
The Common Loon, a singularly uncommon bird.
Copyright © 2009 Ian de W. Semple
