Swans in snow signal Spring!
Tundra Swans (c) Gregor Beck
The season’s first swan sighting kindled the same memory it does each year. I had learned a lot about Tundra Swans and other swans, geese and ducks, as a student in the 70s, when I worked for University of Toronto zoology professor Murray Speirs, combing the diaries of James L. (“Jim”) Baillie, assistant curator of ornithology for five decades at the Royal Ontario Museum. My work seemed confined to a small desk at the U of T’s Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library, where the diaries are held, but the entries flew me daily to the many natural areas and bird migration hotspots of Ontario. From that summer job, I became a serious “birder” – as bird watchers prefer, actually insist, to be called – as well as resolving to target a career in conservation and the environment.
Each year from 1920s to 60s, the diaries spoke of short trips Jim would take from his Toronto home to the Long Point area on the north shore of Lake Erie, in Ontario. As they have for millennia, Tundra Swans arrive in south-western Ontario area from late February to early April, but mostly in mid-March. Up to 15,000 or more carpet the Lake Erie shoreline marshes and adjoining corn fields, along with endless flocks of ducks and geese on their northbound migrations. Saturday, we estimated about 2,000 swans, white-on-white in the flurries and snow-dusted fields.
Tundra Swans breed in coastal tundra wetlands in North America and Eurasia, a so-called “circumpolar distribution”. In eastern North America, they spend the winter along the south-eastern Atlantic coastline, largely from Chesapeake Bay to the Carolinas, while the western population winters along the Pacific Coast. Long ago over-hunted to seriously low numbers in eastern Canada and the U.S., they have been protected throughout most of the 20th Century and have doubled in number over the last three decades, largely from feeding on waste corn and other grains during winters.
Recovery of Tundra Swans and other waterfowl generally has been an outstanding conservation success story in North America, and a testament to long-term cooperation among governments in Canada, the U.S. and Mexico, under the Migratory Birds Convention. Conservation-minded hunting groups and environmental organizations like WWF are also part of the wider effort. Wildlife Habitat Canada also comes to mind, an organization I served and chaired for a while in the 90s as a member of its board.
Bird Studies Canada and the Long Point Basin Land Trust are two of the locally-based groups with strong track records in conservation in the Long Point area. In the 1980s, WWF-Canada also helped to spark creation of the Carolinian Canada Coalition, which today still coordinates many conservation actors across south-western Ontario.
It may still be late winter on the calendar, but spring migration is well underway. Tundra Swans and hundreds of other bird species are surging northwards, along coastlines, lakeshores, and river valleys – many even through and over our backyards. Get out and enjoy spring migration, then think what you’ll do next to conserve life on Earth.
