Like me, loons are monogamous, and also like me, they prefer to copulate on land. But this is about where our carnal similarities end. Did you know that a breeding pair of loons will go at it daily, sometimes two or three times a day, during their spring mating season? Or that the invitation to bump cloacas involves bill dipping, side-by-side swimming, and courtship vocalizations described as low, moan-like hoots? How about that a goodly portion of loon nookie takes place in the morning? It’s true: one study documented more than 80 per cent of observed loon sex occurring before 9 a.m.
I love that for them! Morning sex is terrific, and if you’re not fussy about your search history, it’s easy to Google up alleged experts offering reasons why, including that a post-coital shot of oxytocin does wonders for one’s stress level throughout the day. Sadly, however, and unlike the loons, my wife and I have jobs. Also unlike loons, we did not abandon our fledglings after 12 weeks. They haven’t struck out for their own ponds, and their bedroom door is three feet from ours, well within earshot of any and all courtship vocalizations.
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But not at the cottage. There, in our shingled and pine-framed sleeping cabin, grown-ups and children retire to separate floors. No bus pickups or early meetings demand our haste, and the kids, tuckered from long days of swimming and lax bedtimes, have a tendency to sleep in. So when the dawn breaks—the sun dappling through the gauzy curtains, the loons’ morning wails echoing across the lake—it can only mean one thing: time to make some moan-like hoots of our own.
My wife’s family cabin complex—“the camp,” in local parlance—is on Great Pond, in central Maine, some 100 km from the border with Quebec as the crow flies. Great Pond has a pedigree in the literature of cottaging. For one, it inspired On Golden Pond. Playwright Ernest Thompson spent his childhood summers there and adapted his own 1979 play for the 1981 Oscar-winning film, in which Henry Fonda and Katharine Hepburn portray the Thayers, a pair of cottagers staring down their 80s and coming to grips with mortality.
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For another, it is the setting of E.B. White’s “Once More to the Lake,” one of the most anthologized essays of all time, in which White returns to the lakeside camp of his youth and contemplates, well, mortality again. In the essay’s closing line, he watches his son seemingly reenact moments from his own childhood, right down to the way he excitedly pulls on a cold, damp pair of swim trunks. “As he buckled the swollen belt,” White writes, “suddenly my groin felt the chill of death.”
I am 35 years Norman Thayer’s junior, and I’m pleased to say my groin has not felt any death chills. And yet, for those of us on or beyond the cusp of middle age, many of us busy parents and professionals, it might be that our groins aren’t getting the workouts they did, say, 10 or 20 years ago. It might be that groin workouts, in the face of weeknight exhaustion, are yet another thing we have to find time for, even to schedule.
But morning sex at the camp, like most everything else at the camp, is blissfully unscheduled. Languorous. Playful. One of the gifts of cottage life is how it restores a patient intentionality to activities that might be perfunctory at home. After we’ve finished rolling around beneath the old wool blankets, when we’ve caught our breath and maybe snoozed a little more, we head to the kitchen cabin to make coffee in the Chemex, to sweep yesterday’s grit off the dining porch, to gather up the suits and towels from the drying rack.
Corridor created for “Moose Sex Project”
Then it’s down to the dock while the water’s still glassy and while the loons are still calling out for each other, reminding us what a lucky thing it is to have someone to swim side by side with.
This article was originally published in the June/July 2025 issue of Cottage Life.
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