MISQUAH — It happened Sunday morning, early, in air so clear the far shore could testify. The second of Big Pelican’s juvenile loons — the careful one, the one that spent eleven days watching its sibling fly and filing the information — made its run down the lake, and this time the run ended in the air.

Those who saw it agree on the essentials: a long, committed takeoff, a climb with none of the first flight’s wobble, a distance most witnesses put at four hundred yards or better, one wide steady turn, and a landing that can only be called competent — feet out, angle right, minimal spray, the kind of arrival that suggests the bird had been rehearsing in its head the whole time. Which, on the evidence of eleven days of visible deciding, it had.

The comparison to the first flight — shorter, crookeder, and concluded, per this page, like a dropped duffel — is unavoidable, and this newspaper will indulge it exactly once: the second flight was better. The first flyer was present for it, floating mid-lake, and issued no comment. “The brave one went first and the careful one went farther,” said one of the anglers who has watched the pair all summer. “That’s about how it goes with siblings.”

The flight was entered in Greta Solberg’s log within the hour, under an entry her family reports she considered for some time before writing. It reads, in full: “TWO FLY. The careful one waited until it knew how. Log continues until they leave.” The adults observed Sunday’s proceedings from the north end at a distance the summer has made customary, and the chain-wide count holds at fourteen adults and five chicks, all five now feathered and two now aviators. Fall departure remains weeks off. The log, as noted, continues — but the summer’s question, open since the first wing-flaps of July, is answered. They can both do it. They were always going to. It is still, somehow, the best news of the year.