MISQUAH — The first loon chicks of the season were sighted on Big Pelican over the weekend — two of them, riding low on their mother’s back near the Loon Ridge shoreline — prompting the Chain’s loon-count volunteers to revise their tally upward and the resort, once again, to ask its guests to slow down.

The hatch was confirmed by Greta Solberg, the sixth-grader whose loon-monitoring project the library has certified, with only partial irony, as “actually science,” and who has watched the nest platform most mornings since it went in this spring. Loons nest at the water’s very edge and ride their chicks for the first weeks of life, when the young birds cannot yet dive; a boat wake that washes over them can swamp a nest or separate a chick from its parents, and a separated chick, Solberg notes flatly, “doesn’t get a second chance, it just doesn’t.”

The plea carries extra weight this year because the same pair lost a chick to a snapping turtle two summers ago — a loss the whole lake felt, and the reason Solberg started counting in the first place. The Department of Natural Resources reminds boaters that the marked no-wake zones near nesting areas are in force through midsummer, and that the chicks, in the words of conservation officer Dan Roux, “did not sign up for a wake, and can’t read the buoys you can.”

The numbers, for the record: last June’s Chain-wide count logged twelve adult loons and three chicks across the seven lakes, down one nesting pair from the year before — the kind of small arithmetic the volunteers keep in a spiral notebook that now runs back eleven summers. The platform this pair chose was built and anchored by the Lions Club in April, an investment of one Saturday and about forty dollars that Solberg rates “the best thing the grown-ups have done for this lake lately, no offense.”

Loon Ridge general manager Renée Fontaine said the resort had posted additional reminders at the marina and the boat rental and would “gently mention it” to guests heading out, a courtesy she extends every June with mixed results. The geese on the seventh fairway, asked to comment, did not. Volunteers will hold the annual Chain-wide loon count Monday at dawn from the public landings; the loons, as in every prior year, are not expected to cooperate, and will be carefully estimated.