T was never just a popularity contest. Had that been the case, we could have awarded the common loon first place and skipped the public vote altogether. Perhaps it’s the image of this waterbird struck on the Canadian dollar for the last 30 years or its se

in Ontario’s Algonquin Park it is loons — the doormen of each lake, black-tie emissaries that cavort with us like dolphins — who put on a veritable vocal Olympics. A classic, lonely cry rises from one end of the lake, and a laughing, maniacal answer emanates from the other; while these echo around the water, more join in and soon the sounds are bouncing off all sides, colliding in the middle like waves in a bathtub. It’s odd something like this can seem both eerie and comforting in the same instant. “The loon here is laughing again,” wrote John Mcphee, “so I laugh back. He laughs. I laugh. He laughs. I laugh. He will keep it up until I am hoarse. He likes conversation. He talks this way with other loons. I am endeavouring to tell him that he is a hopeless degenerate killer of trout. He laughs.” Despite ease of association with the word “lunatic,” loons are actually named for their strange walk — moving on land like a bent-over penguin about to tip over beak first. But their discomfort with on which they spend little time, and then only during nesting season, is the flipside of an exquisite adaptation to lake living. With legs set far back and moulded into powerful paddles, they can rocket like a torpedo under water, twisting and turning after fish and invertebrate prey and diving to 60 metres. In turn, loons are eaten by large fish and by devious raccoons, weasels and skunks when they’re nesting. First Nations hunters have a small loon quota in parts of Algonquin, but the population remains stable; it’s difficult to go an hour without seeing one. But tracking these birds isn’t easy; their movements are notoriously random: when a loon dives it might pop up next to you or half a kilometre away; its whole body may surface or just its head and neck; sometimes, when they feel particularly threatened, only their beak will appear, vertically like a snorkel; two loons diving together may come up far apart or vice versa; loons may display no interest in you whatsoever or be obviously curious. But whatever they do, as Mcphee notes, they will laugh it off in characteristic style, as if the joke of their unpredictability is on the observer. The loon indeed authenticates a northern lake and in so doing has, to some extent, authenticated an entire country. This is the reason Canada’s bronze-plated