All quiet on the waterfront – except at 2 p.m. on Burlington Bay. That’s when the trumpeter swans touch down, knowing that food is on offer, and the air rings like a brass band gone bad.
Magnificent in flight, cantankerous on the ground, this indigenous species – the largest waterfowl in North America – had vanished from Ontario. They hadn’t been seen here since 1886 when a hunter at Long Point on Lake Erie shot the last known trumpeter, migrating from the west.
Then along came Harry Lumsden. For nearly three decades the self-taught biologist, now 86 and retired from the Ministry of Natural Resources, with the help of dozens of volunteers has brought the swans back to Ontario. There are well over 1,000 trumpeters in the south-central part of the province now — that from none when he started the restoration program in 1982. Another victory: the population is self-sustaining.
But these swans, many raised in breeding programs and fed by volunteers, are different from wild swans – they don’t know how to fully migrate. They need to winter in a place with open water shallow enough to tip to the bottom for food.
The 200 swans that flock to the shores of LaSalle Park in Burlington in winter practise a small migration – they come from places like Wye Marsh near Midland or Kirkland Lake or North Bay. They arrive in November. Volunteers spend hours banding birds and registering tag numbers – to identify them, their nesting and migrating patterns, their mates, their longevity, a family tree of sorts – and rescue those in poor health. In winter, they may feed swans about 50 kilograms of corn a day.
Feeding wildlife can stir controversy, but in Lumsden’s view, there’s no harm in winter-feeding in Burlington. “You hold birds in a suitable habitat with adequate food and don’t suffer losses the way you do when birds (who travel further) are likely to be lead poisoned or killed on the highway.”
Some birds have learned how to cross Lake Ontario to get to warmer climes where food is abundant. For some, by tracking their tags, there is no record of their return to Ontario.
“Nearly half the birds that go to the States don’t come back. We never hear from them again. We assume they are dead, but at LaSalle park a very high proportion of the birds survive the winter.”
Now, with spring’s arrival, the birds are returning to their nesting grounds in the north.
Trumpeters are long lived and form long-term bonds with their mates. They learn how to migrate from their parents. “This learned behaviour becomes traditional behaviour that they repeat for the rest of their lives,” says Jack Hughes, a waterfowl biologist for the Canadian Wildlife Service. (Shorter-lived songbirds and shore birds are fed by their parents until they learn to fly – then find their own way south.)
But if parents have been bred and raised in captivity, the migratory patterns are lost; and their offspring don’t have anyone from which to learn the migration routes, says Hughes.
The mini-migration to Burlington began with a single swan with a hearty appetite known as Pig Pen. (Her name is also a play on words: female swans are called pens; males are cobs.) In 1992, through chance or inspiration – staff at Wye Marsh wonder if she flew high and saw the blue of Lake Ontario – she made a successful trial flight to Burlington and back to the marsh. In 1993, with her mate and six cygnets, she flew south to Burlington where they spent the winter. In her lifetime she produced 70 descendents, many of which now migrate from Wye Marsh. “She taught a whole generation,” says Laurie Shutt, executive director of Wye Marsh, where staff and volunteers monitor about one-third of the province’s trumpeter swan population.
For restoration of Ontario’s trumpeters to be complete, in the future, they should be able to migrate to their ancestral wintering grounds in the southern United States.
Now LaSalle Park has the largest concentration of trumpeters in Ontario in the winter.
On a recent afternoon at La Salle, trumpeters mingle with – and nip at – the orange-billed mute swans. As Beverly Kingdon and her husband, Ray, scatter corn in an effort to capture and tag a swan, the shoreline is a chaotic expressway of geese, one stream going east, another west and others muddling in between, all trumpeting madly.
“Come on, swans,” calls Kingdon. And they come to her.
She’s been smitten with swans since she first saw them at age eight. She vowed she would have swans when she grew up – an affection that never left her. “It was the true, clean, white crisp beauty. All those feathers, every one in place,” says Kingdon, who’s retired from MasterCard and now gives presentations on swans around the province. “It was absolute perfection. I thought ... I’ve never seen anything in my life this beautiful.”
Swans were hunted in the 18th and 19th centuries for their feathers and their skins, which were used to make powder puffs. Their feet were used for change purses. Based on archaeological evidence, it appears that swan meat was a substantial part of the diet at the Jesuit mission of Ste. Marie Among the Hurons in the 17th century.
The restoration of trumpeters in Ontario began with swans eggs obtained through the Canadian Wildlife Service and Alberta’s department of natural resources. The first trumpeters were hatched in mute swan nests – the females didn’t object to the newcomers, but the males did. They’d attack the trumpeter cygnets, which were a silvery colour, compared to the brown mute cygnets.
To protect the little trumpeters, Lumsden tinted the feathers so they were darker in colour, a ruse that seemed to satisfy the male swans. “It made them look like mute cygnets and then the males were perfect fathers,” he says.
There was another problem: the mute swans weren’t effective in protecting the trumpeter cygnets from snapping turtles. Assertive trumpeters splash water and pick at the turtles, and they eventually leave the cygnets alone.
“The turtle is very glad to get into deep water and away from them,” says Lumsden. The survival rate of trumpeters raised by their own kind is twice that of those raised by mutes.
Lumsden later solicited volunteers – he called them co-operators – people who lived in rural areas with ponds and were agreeable to caring for captive birds.
When cygnets were born, they were left with parents for about 100 days until they were nearly ready to fly. They were then taken to holding pens at the Grand River Conservation Authority near Cambridge and looked after until they were one to two years old, then released into the wild.
With swans now successfully breeding in the wild, Lumsden has stopped placing them with co-operators. Lumsden, who has recorded Ontario’s trumpeters in more than a dozen ledgers at his home near Aurora, knows the birds’ histories intimately. He points to a swan family of five that’s been coming to Burlington for eight years.
“They’re from Kirkland Lake and they’ll be leaving in a week. They arrive within the same four-day period from year to year. Wonderful family. Good parents.”
