Swans rule the roost in Hespeler’s mill pond
Keith Wilson says this is mute swan territory; they’ve been here for as long as he can recall
CAMBRIDGE — Three mute swans — with pristine white down, orange bills and knob-nosed Jimmy Durante profiles — glided in front of a long lineup of Canada Geese.
An impromptu royal inspection unfolded slowly along the Speed River.
They worked against a gentle tide on a Thursday afternoon on Hespeler’s swollen, midsummer mill pond waters above a rumbling old dam.
The mute swans rule here. This is their surf and their turf.
That’s been the pecking and hissing order for as long as Keith Wilson, cane in hand and 70 birthday candles still smouldering, can recall. This is mute swan territory.
“I can’t remember them not being here,” said Wilson, gazing out over the mill pond waters from the raised back deck of his home on Queen Street.
Let’s go back 21 years when Coventry raised Wilson moved to this cottage-in-thecity address with his French-Canadian wife France, an ordained Anglican minister.
At least one mute swan swam these waters then, he recalls. Eventually, one became two. Now, two have become a family of three — two adults and a youthful cygnet hatched this past spring, according to the Ministry of Natural Resources and Forestry.
Keith and France often watched the two swans from their back deck.
They’d come right up to the edge of Little Riverside Park, which nudges the Wilson residence, and feed on the aquatic plants growing on the edge of the water.
When the trumpeter swans, making a pit stop on a migratory mission would arrive in the spring, the mute swans would get nasty and ornery to defend their waters.
They live here all year. It’s unusual, Wilson said. But this is their chosen home. The trumpeters just blow in and out like they own the joint. That won’t fly with the mutes.
“The mutes don’t like it,” said Wilson, a retired aerospace industry production manager and former corrections officer. “There’ll be a half a dozen of these trum-
peters, then you’ll see these two mute swans attacking them like a flotilla. They can be vicious buggers.”
They need to protect and be protected.
That’s what Wilson learned growing up in the middle of England. The regal swan is the Queen’s bird. When he was eight, his school sent him out to find nests and count goslings.
Now, decades later, his own kids raised, he is watching a swan family grow on the edge of his riverside backyard, on other side of the ocean.
So were his river’s edge neighbours along Queen Street.
They’ll defend the swans like family, Wilson said.
“Anybody touches those swans, they’re going to be dead themselves, I’ll tell you,” Wilson said.
“All the people up here, the swans are ours.”
One became two became three. But addition eventually is followed by subtraction.
Two years ago, France died of cancer. Two became one. Wilson, whose favourite leather reclining chair was being repaired on Thursday, doesn’t watch the swans as often as he used to when France was by his side. But blue herons, feeding as noisily as a T-Rex along the shoreline, draw his attention back to the water.
The three mute swans are always making the mill pond rounds. He can count on it.
“You just sit down here and wait,” Wilson said. “They’ll come.”