When local birder Deb Powell first saw a trumpeter swan, she was struck by just how big it was.
Known for its sheer size – exceeding five feet in length and weighing about the same as a two-year-old child – and its characteristic ‘musical’ call, the trumpeter swan is North America’s largest bird capable of flight.
“You could understand why people ate swans,” Powell said jokingly about their size.
Powell said when she was struck by the bird’s elegance and beauty by the Bristol pier a few years ago, trumpeter swans were still a relatively rare occurrence. But that doesn’t seem to be the case anymore.
Powell isn’t the only Pontiac birder who’s managed to catch a glimpse of the trumpeter swan. She said in the past few years more and more birders have been reporting seeing them in the area.
In the past few weeks, sightings of the birds have been reported near Johnson Lake in Thorne, on Litchfield Lake, and on chem. Perrault in Sheenboro, with others reported in Eastern Ontario and in the Ottawa area, despite the bird not being commonly found in the area.
Kyna Intini, the master bander of Trumpeter Swan Conservation Ontario, volunteers tagging hundreds of the birds every year for the organization, which rescues and rehabilitates birds across the province. She said the birds are making a remarkable comeback after the species’ future once looked grim.
She said trumpeter populations once lived across North America, but starting in the late 1700s companies such as the Hudson’s Bay Company started hunting the birds for their skin and feathers, which were used in women’s fashion items as well as for writing quills. Their webbed feet were also used to make change purses.
“The Hudson’s Bay Company sent skins back to England in the hundreds of thousands,” Intini said.
By the late 1800s, trumpeter swan populations had been decimated due to overhunting. A 1932 survey by the United States National Park service found 69 birds in the states of Montana and Wyoming, believed at the time to be the only birds of the species still alive. Later, more remnant populations were found in the Canadian Rocky Mountains and Alaska.
In Ontario, a volunteer named Harry Lumsden saw an opportunity to re-populate the species. In the 1980s, he obtained eggs from the Rocky Mountain and Alaska populations, and with the cooperation of wetland-owning volunteers, began to host breeding pairs.
“As the cygnets [baby swans] were ready to fledge, they would be taken and held for a year so that they would be a little bit more experienced. And then they were released around the province,” Intini said.
Today, 140 years after the final bird in Ontario was shot, the Ontario population has rebounded to 3,200, with large rehabilitated populations in southern and eastern Ontario. The American Trumpeter Swan Society determined there to be over 15,000 trumpeters worldwide, though most are in North America.
Trumpeter swans were not known historically to be very common in Quebec. The first confirmed breeding record in the province was from 2010, in the Abitibi region, with various sightings being reported since then in the Rouyn-Noranda and Val-d’Or regions.
Intini said many of the birds recently spotted in the Pontiac very likely belong to some of the Eastern Ontario population. Many swans in Quebec have been wing-tagged on the species’ wintering grounds on Lake Ontario, including populations in Burlington, Kingston and other locations.
According to the Trumpeter Swan Society, the species lost many of its migration traditions when the population was decimated, and many swans are re-learning new migration patterns.
The birds breed in various kinds of wetland including small ponds, marshes, bogs, and quiet stretches of river. As they prepare for migration, trumpeter swans gather at sites near open water such as inlets with moving water and larger, deeper lakes.
Intini said as these populations continue to grow, and the birds seek out more breeding sites, residents in Quebec will likely see more of these birds in the future.
“Anywhere there’s a suitable wetland, they’re definitely going to be looking at breeding, and as the population expands more birds are going to be looking for those types of areas,” she said.
Intini, who handles several hundred of the birds every year, spends a lot of time around the swans and says they are not afraid to use their very unique call.
