Arctic Light

I need to introduce you to something which has made my life 1000% better: loons trying to fly.

So apparently loons are extremely optimized for swimming. Their legs are located in the back of the loon. This makes them incredibly good at swimming.



.... in an uncanny valley sort of way.

When they get on land, things go wrong.



(Skip to about 0:49 for the loon climbing out on land.)

So yeah, the legs are in the back and all the weight is in the front, so the closest they can manage to walking is a sort of awkward flopping. This also means they can't take off from land because they can't get up enough speed. Apparently they sort of struggle with that in water as well, because they don't have hollow bones (makes them better at diving) and are extremely heavy. The only way they can achieve liftoff is by frantically running along the surface of the water flapping, and it is FUCKING HILARIOUS.





I think part of what makes it so funny, aside from the cartoonlike frantic flailing, is the way that it goes on far beyond where you would expect a duck, say, to actually take off. It's like - okay, liftoff now? Nope, still running!!

I wonder if this is an intermediate stage on the way to a penguin. I mean, you could see them eventually achieving verticality and being able to walk around on land again.

This does explain why we don't really have loons around here. (I mean, not Alaska in general, which is full of them, but the valley I live in.) They make an incredibly distinctive noise that can be heard a long way off, and sometimes in the summer I'll hear a very distant loon wail, but I think the lakes we have around here just aren't big enough for them.