Lake Erie. March 2, 2022. It occurred to me yesterday that we should be seeing the first flights of Tundra Swans any day now. With that in mind, and since today started bright, warmer by a hair and with no threat of snow, I decided to head towards Lake Erie where the first swans sometimes gather and where other open-country, wintering specialties might be found.
I stopped for a break halfway and noted that the large river was thronged with anxious and vocal Canada Geese, Mallards, Goldeneyes and even a few Northern Pintail. Although the river was rimmed and sometimes blanketed with broken ice, I think the birds could all feel a change in the air. Wandering back to my car, I felt more than heard a chorus of faint calls, it sounded like Tundra Swans somewhere overhead. I spun around searching, almost losing my balance while staring up at the bright clouds and looking for a string of birds; and then found them, about twelve in a small V, twinkling white against the blue sky. They were talking amongst themselves in their soft and sighing ‘whoo – whoo – whoo’.

Every year I celebrate the moment when the first overhead Tundra Swans stop me dead in my tracks, they are always My Birds of the Day. Looking back, I see Tundra Swans posts in February or March of every year, try this link , this or this one for more on these celebratory days.
That first group of a dozen was soon followed by a much larger flock of about forty, they were all heading in the same direction as me, towards the lake.
An hour or so later I was gazing across the lake, the first lookout was a wildlife desert, nothing but an expanse of fractured ice in bands of blues, greys and whites, spectacular but forbidding. I followed the lakeshore west and eventually caught up with Tundra Swans congregating in groups with Canada Geese, at first a dozen or so, then twenty or more and finally scatterings of swans on the water. They were greeting long skeins of new arrivals, flying in low, and still strong after their non-stop night and day flight from the Atlantic coast.
The swans made my day but I was also happy to witness a low-flying adult Bald Eagle, a Rough–legged Hawk hovering the same way a Eurasian Kestrel (the ‘windhover’) would, and a scattering of Horned Larks.
It was a fairly full day with almost too much driving. The beauty of the Tundra Swans prompted me to start writing this post. But then, with the afternoon fading into evening, I took a short break and, sprawling on a small couch, I looked over my shoulder and outdoors to see yet another flight of Tundra Swans heading west. We ran outside as they passed over us, a long lop-sided V of perhaps seventy birds.
Every now and then I feel I need to explain my approach to birding, how, what and why it fires my interest. There are all sorts of ways to enjoy birding and I invariably say something like; For me it’s as much about the bird, the time and the place as anything else It doesn’t have to be a rarity. And that’s how it was today: those bringers of spring, an early March morning, and right overhead.