MISQUAH — The summer rec swim lessons at the Loon Lake landing have moved to early mornings, rec director Lori Dahl confirmed, partly to beat the building late-June heat and partly in direct response to what the registration form now formally and unblinkingly calls “bear days,” of which the season has already produced at least two.

Attendance is up roughly a third since the change, a swing Dahl attributes to a happy convergence of factors: the mornings are cooler and easier on everyone, the lake is glass-calm before the day’s boats churn it up, and the bears, she notes with the matter-of-factness of long experience, “tend to do their business at the dumpster overnight and turn in around dawn, so by the time we’re in the water they’re sleeping it off somewhere, same as anybody after a big night.” The lessons, taught by two certified high-school instructors, run weekday mornings through August, beginners at eight and the older group at nine.

Parents are asked to bring a towel, a water bottle, and the usual willingness, and — the one genuinely new instruction — to watch the fire-hall sign, which Dahl updates by seven each morning with one of exactly two words. “It says SWIM,” she explained, “or, on the rare morning, it says BEAR, and on a BEAR morning you stay home and we make it up Thursday, and nobody argues, because the sign is not a suggestion.” In its first two weeks the sign has read BEAR twice, both times correctly, which Dahl counts as a perfect record and the cheapest, most effective piece of safety equipment the program owns.