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Rob Glover is an associate professor of political science and honors at the University of Maine and a resident of Hampden. Amanda Sohns is the owner of the Rock & Art Shop. (They are both immensely thankful to Nicole Brown, who provided editorial and research support for this column).
Maine loves its loons. They grace our lakes, anchor summer evenings with their eerie, haunting calls, and serve as one of Maine’s symbols of natural beauty. The loon is so beloved that it’s practically a celebrity. No offense to chickadees, but it’s loons you’ll find on coffee mugs and ballcaps from Kittery to Fort Kent.
But here’s something that’s been bugging us: a group of loons is called an “asylum.”
Yes, it’s technically true. Asylum is the collective noun you’ll find in birding and wildlife glossaries. It’s meant to be whimsical wordplay, a nod to the old “loony” and “lunatic” nicknames, rooted in the idea that loons are wild or unhinged. But in Maine, we know better.
First, let’s be honest: This is the wink-and-nod stuff of which Mainers tire. We’ve seen enough “Maine-iac” and “Maine-ly” references to last 10 lifetimes. It might get a chuckle from a vacationing out-of-stater, but we know it’s stale. And if you’re starting a business and feel tempted to include “Mainely,” please just don’t.
More importantly, though (and this is where the humor stops), “asylum” has a long, painful history when it comes to mental health.
In the not-so-distant past, “asylum” was the term for institutions where people with mental health issues or developmental disabilities were sent, often for the rest of their lives. While some were founded with noble intentions, too many became sites of neglect, abuse and dehumanization. People were warehoused, stripped of dignity and severed from families and communities.
This occurred despite the work of tireless advocates like Hampden’s Dorothea Dix who, after serving as the first female superintendent of nurses for the Union Army, spent her life working to make such treatment temporary rather than “custodial institutions for the incurable poor.”
For many Mainers, this isn’t abstract history. It’s their lived experience. Maine’s history of psychiatric care includes institutions like the Augusta Mental Health Institute (AMHI), where for decades people endured overcrowding, underfunding and inhumane treatment. Maine dedicated a memorial to nearly 12,000 AMHI patients buried in unmarked paupers’ graves there in 2015. A 34-year-old class action lawsuit by former patients at AMHI was only resolved last year.
Against this backdrop, “asylum” is not some quaint, Victorian word. It conjures up trauma of loved ones lost to systems that saw them as problems to be contained rather than people deserving of care.
Using “asylum” as a cutesy label for our favorite bird unintentionally trivializes that history. We make a joke out of something that caused (and in many ways still causes) profound suffering.
And here’s the thing: We don’t need to. If our goal is a colorful, memorable collective noun for loons, we can do much better.
Allow us to propose a modest alternative: an “opera” of loons.
Think about it. Loons are always dressed to the nines in their black-and-white plumage, ready for a night at the symphony. Their calls are complex, haunting and layered — part yodel, part tremolo, part wail. On a still summer night, when moonlight turns the lake to glass and the loons start to sing, it feels like they’ve gathered an audience and their performance is just for you.
“Opera” captures all of that. The drama, the beauty, that ineffable sense of wonder. It invites us to see loons not as a punchline, but as performers in their own right.
So next time you hear that haunting chorus bouncing off the still, dark water: sit back, listen and let the performance wash over you. The curtain has gone up. The stars are out. And the singers are in perfect form.
More critically, language matters. Our words color how we think about the world, and about one another. Retiring “asylum” as the go-to term for a group of loons isn’t about being overly sensitive. It’s about recognizing that some words carry baggage that overshadows whatever snarky humor was intended — and about replacing them with words that honor both our wildlife and our shared humanity.
