Burlington ON. March 11 2020. I bet I’ve written one of these In Praise of Tundra Swans every year. But they got me again this morning, just as they do every early March. My first of the year flight of Tundra Swans always stops me in my tracks and lifts me, gladdens my heart is the right term I think. And as is usually the case, I was just going about meeting my commitments of the day, when I heard the soft, vaguely overlapping whoo whoo whoo, of a skein of Tundra Swans passing hundreds of feet up. When the day is right, as it was this morning, the straggling V flashes white in the morning sun.
The first V-flight was perhaps two or three hundred strong and not far behind them another 50 or 60, then much later this morning, another 70 or so.
I have to stop and contemplate the journey they’ve just made: from somewhere on the Atlantic coast, perhaps Chesapeake Bay, where they’ve been since November. Then yesterday something, probably daylight length, a west wind or maybe a succession of right-feeling days, told them it’s time to get moving. So, they left, pulling each other off the open waters in whispering ones, twos and family groups until assembled for the first overnight stage, from there to here, around 600 kilometers. Here, at the west end of Lake Ontario or more likely along the edges of Lake Erie, they’ll set down, regroup, refuel and wait for the next cue to say it’s time to press on. Sometime around mid-late May they will arrive on their nesting grounds along the shores of Hudson Bay and the Arctic Ocean in Canada’s Nunavut and North West Territories. We may not see them again this year, not many of them anyway, their fall migration tends to follow other routes.
Your write up about the tundra swans was beautiful. Thank you for it. It brought to mind those few occasions I have seen them fly overhead and have heard those calls – an experience that stays with you forever.