MISQUAH — Both eggs on the Big Pelican nest platform have hatched, and the resident loon pair is now a family of four — the two chicks riding low on their parents’ backs in the way that empties every dock on the lake of conversation for a minute or two at a time, the way that makes a person set down the coffee and just watch.

The hatch was logged, to the day, by Greta Solberg, 12, whose ongoing loon-monitoring project the librarian Ruth Aune has once again certified, with only partial irony, as “actually science.” Solberg has checked the nest most mornings since the platform went in this spring, keeping the pair’s comings and goings in a notebook she will not let anyone photograph and recording the hatch the way other twelve-year-olds record a high score. “They can’t dive away from a wake yet,” she said. “Here’s the rule, and you can have it for free: if you can read your boat’s name in your own wake, you’re going too fast near the chicks. That’s it. That’s the whole science of it for the next month.”

The volume of this year’s no-wake pleas has a history behind it. The same pair lost a chick to a snapping turtle two summers ago — a loss the whole lake remembers, and that Solberg, who was ten when it happened and started the survey because of it, has not. A wake can’t be taken back, she notes, and a chick that can’t dive doesn’t get a second chance to. She speaks about it plainly, without the sentiment adults reach for, because she learned early that sentiment is the thing that makes people stop listening. “It’s just numbers,” she said. “Two chicks, or fewer chicks. Everything I’m asking is to keep it at two.”

With holiday boat traffic building toward the heaviest of the year, her request is simple, and she has made it to the celebration committee, to Alderman Bunde, who took it up as a cause, and to anyone who will hold still long enough to hear it: slow down on the north end of Big Pelican through July. “They’ve got two,” she said. “Two is good. Two is better than we’ve had since the turtle. Let’s keep two.”