MISQUAH — They are gone. The adults that raised two chicks on Big Pelican this summer — the pair everybody on this lake has watched since the eggs in May — left sometime during fair week, and nobody saw it, because everybody was at the fairgrounds.

This is normal and it is how it usually happens. The staging groups that formed at the north ends in mid-August get bigger and noisier for a week or two, and then one morning the lake is quiet and the count is off, and by the time anybody is sure, they have been gone two days. The last confirmed sighting of the Big Pelican adults was Wednesday evening. By Sunday morning, with the rain coming down, there were none on the lake and none on Loon Lake either.

The juveniles are still here. Both of them, flying every morning, ranging farther each week, feeding well, and — this is the part that gets people — entirely on their own now, on a lake they have never left, with no adult to follow when they go. They will leave in their own time, weeks from now, separately, and find a coast none of them has seen. Nobody has ever adequately explained how. I have stopped expecting anyone to.

Greta Solberg, who is eight and has kept the log since May, wrote the second entry under LEAVING on Sunday. Her mother reports it took her a while to write and that it is four words long. It reads: “The big ones went.”

Below it, on the same page, she has drawn two small shapes on a line of water, and left the rest of the page for later.

---