Word: loon
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...hard covers, will be indulged between actual, seat-of-the-pants books. To E. (for Edgar) L. (for Lawrence) Doctorow's credit, he includes no commencement speeches, letters to the Times, book reviews or similar lint balls in this between-books collection. Instead, the author of Ragtime and Loon Lake offers six short stories, impeccably done, rather academic, mostly forgettable, and one 65-page mishmash called, for want of an accurate tag, a novella. The mishmash, surprisingly enough, is a delight, largely because it knits up all that has gone before...
They call themselves the loon rangers. They have counterparts in north-country states from Maine to Wisconsin. In New Hampshire in 1979, the three-year-old Loon Preservation Committee found that only 39 lakes were being used by nesting loons, a decrease of 50% over 50 years. The population had dropped from thousands to a few hundred. The reasons were people, crowding, motorboats, Jet Skis. In the past five years, through the efforts of people like Fair, who earned his master's degree in wildlife biology before signing on as director of the committee in 1981, and Minor...
...lunch in a remote village, a man named Ralph comes over to chide Fair. Ralph is a heavy contributor to the loon committee. "We had a loon around the dock yesterday," Ralph says. "I tried to hit it with a canoe paddle, but it got away...
...Yeah," says Jeff, "they're pretty fast." Later he allows, "You can't let the loon jokes bother...
...birds themselves are funny though. John McPhee observed that a loon's "maximum air speed is 60 miles an hour, and his stall-out speed must be 59. Anyway, he scarcely slows up, apparently because he thinks he will fall." Big fat feet out behind them, they crash-land on their bellies, an avian comedy. On land, they flop along on their stomachs. When it rains, they mistake highways for lakes, come down like thunderbolts. People are always tending their abrasions and taking them back to ponds. To take off, they need as much as a quarter-mile...