A vocabulary of landscape — a landscape of words
1469 entries
loon
A loon is a heavy-bodied diving bird of northern lakes with legs set so far back on the body that it can barely walk on land. It dives from the surface and swims down after fish, sometimes to two hundred feet, and its bones are partly solid rather than hollow, which reduces buoyancy. In summer plumage, it is patterned in black and white in sharp geometric blocks, and its calls carry for miles across water at night.
Etymology
The word appears to come from a Norse or Shetland term for the bird, related to words meaning lame or clumsy, describing how it moves on land. The unrelated English loon meaning a fool, and the phrase crazy as a loon, come from a different word entirely, though the bird’s wailing call has kept the confusion alive.
Notes
There are four distinct calls and they do different jobs. The wail is contact between a pair across distance, the tremolo signals alarm, the yodel is the male’s territorial call and is individually distinctive, and the hoot is close-range family talk. A loon needs a long stretch of open water to take off, running across the surface for many yards, which is why one that comes down on a wet road or a small pond can be stranded there.