Clarion call brought back swans
Bird lovers have returned trumpeters to Ontario and are monitoring their survival
Meet Roo, my new feathered friend.
Well, in truth, I only just met Roo, so she’s more of an acquaintance, really. (I’m hoping to get to know her better over time.)
Her name isn’t really Roo. It’s R00, as in R, zero, zero. That’s the yellow tag number this young swan was given when she was banded on Feb. 7 at Bluffer’s Park in Scarborough by members of the Ontario Trumpeter Swan Restoration Group.
I came across the banding operation purely by chance two weekends ago when I visited the lakeside park on a whim. The volunteers, undeterred by the inclement weather, were using a bucket of corn to lure the swans and cygnets, their offspring, to shore. One at a time, they captured the young birds, gently restrained them, determined their sex, placed a metal band on their legs (the left one for females), put a matching, high-visibility yellow tag on each wing, then quickly released them back to their waiting families.
The entire capture, band and release process took five to 10 minutes per bird and was accompanied by a cacophony of squawking gulls, quacking mallards and the trumpeters themselves. As the adults paddled about in the open water of the bay only a few metres away, their resonant bleatings sounded like an orchestra’s brass section tuning up.
Kyna Intini, one of the licensed volunteers who helped to band a record 10 cygnets that day, told me the Swan Restoration Group, started in 1982 by retired Ministry of Natural Resources biologist Harry Lumsden, has been highly successful.
Trumpeter swans ( Cygnus buccinator) are native to North America and were once found on a large swath of the continent. But the huge birds, the largest waterfowl extant in the world, were hunted to the brink of extinction in the last century, with only a few small colonies remaining out west. The birds were prized as food, their extremely long white feathers and their leather. The unusually soft skin of their feet was used to make fine purses in the 1800s.
Thirty years ago, there were no trumpeters left in Ontario. But Lumsden obtained a few wild birds and eggs from the western colonies, brought them back to Ontario and raised them as coddled captives. When the birds were a few years old and ready to fend for themselves, they were released back into the wild in this province.
Three decades later, it’s estimated there are now about 900 trumpeters in Ontario.
Roo and her siblings at Bluffer’s Park are part of this local success story.
It’s not known where Roo’s mother, H22, and father, L01, nested last spring, as their wing tags have been lost, Intini explains. But last fall, H22 and L01 showed up at Bluffer’s Park with their five offspring — R96, R98, R99, R12 and R00 — in tow. The family will likely stay together until later in the spring when the parents are ready to nest again. At that point, the parents will shoo the cygnets away as they start their annual reproductive cycle over.
The banding and tagging of the young swans doesn’t directly affect the trumpeter population, but it does allow the birds’ movements to be tracked as they move to find food or shelter, or to migrate. That knowledge helps the Swan Restoration Group begin to understand more about the birds’ health and population dynamics.
Wanting to see Roo and her family again, I went back to the bluffs this week to see if I could find her flock. The little inlet at the park where she was tagged was completely frozen over and the birds had moved on. When I finally found the flock of about 30 to 40 birds further east, they were resting comfortably on the frozen lake, honking periodically, even though it was about -20 C.
Trumpeters are completely chill, as it were, with the cold. With a layer of down feathers about five centimetres thick, they are said to be able to withstand temperatures of -30 C for extended periods.
“They’re like polar bears with feathers,” Intini says when asked about the birds’ unusual hardiness, adding there is no worry about their food supply, either.
She says they are eating algae and getting some supplemental food handouts from a group of volunteers at a nearby marina who are keeping an eye on them.
“In really cold and stormy weather, the birds will just hunker down on the ice, conserving their energy,” she says. That is exactly what they were doing a few days ago when I observed them.
I wondered why they didn’t just fly somewhere warmer, where the conditions might be easier.
In time, these trumpeters might move on, Intini says. From sightings of tagged birds, the volunteers know that when they are from two to three years old, they will begin to go exploring. They have been recorded in warmer areas to the south and also as far north as James Bay. For now, though, these magnificent birds call the city’s eastern lakeshore home. The Swan Restoration Group urges everyone to report sightings of tagged birds by emailing trumpeterswan@live.com. They would like to know the date, location (GPS co-ordinates, if known), wing tag and/or leg band number. You can also report trumpeter sightings at the Wye Marsh website (wyemarsh.com/swan-sightings). mbream@thestar.ca