MISQUAH — The two Big Pelican juveniles have discovered that they have wings, and have spent the week finding out, at length and at volume, what the wings do not yet do. Flight practice has begun.

A loon takeoff is a committed thing even for an adult — a long, flailing sprint down the lake, wings hammering, feet slapping, a quarter mile of runway before the water lets go. The juveniles have the sprint. They have the hammering and the slapping. What they do not have is the last part, and so the mornings on Big Pelican this week have featured two nearly-grown loons thundering down the lake in fifty yards of spray and settling back onto the surface with the studied dignity of athletes who meant to do that.

This is right on schedule. Young loons typically fly at eleven or twelve weeks, which for these two means sometime in the next several — and the practice runs will get longer and louder until one morning, without ceremony, one of them simply doesn’t come back down. The adults have taken to demonstrating, lifting off and circling and landing again in what reads unmistakably as instruction, and being watched by two gray students who then go and do the sprint-and-splash again.

The definitive record of the week comes, as it has all summer, from the loon log of Greta Solberg, entering sixth grade, whose latest entry this newspaper was permitted to read. It says, in full: “Both trying to fly. Neither can yet. The brave one crashes farther.” Field biology should be so lucky.

Boaters are asked to give the practice runs a wide berth — a takeoff attempt can’t stop or steer, and a juvenile that has to abort loses more than its dignity. Come fall, both will fly for real, and then they’ll be gone — out to open water, then south, and not back to this lake at all for two or three years, and then likely to a different lake entirely, that being the way of young loons. The town knows this. The town has all summer been getting ready to be proud of it anyway.