How trumpeter swans made a comeback in northern Ontario

Chris Blomme comes to Fielding Park in Sudbury almost every day to check on the birds. And there's lots of them sitting in the trees along the trails or paddling around in the waters of Kelly Lake.

But the ornithologist pays closest attention to the trumpeter swans, who stay here throughout the winter, thanks to open water created by a small set of rapids where Junction Creek empties out of the lake.

"People get used to the idea that these are regulars and know nothing about what it took to get them established," said Blomme.

He remembers well how trumpeter swans vanished from the northern Ontario landscape and were not seen for decades, until dedicated efforts were made to bring them back in the late 1990s and early 2000s.

"They were shot and shot until there weren't any left," biologist Harry Lumsden told CBC in 2002, while releasing three swans onto Callander Bay of Lake Nipissing.

One of the more ambitious attempts to bring swans back involved training them to fly behind an ultra-light aircraft and get them used to moving between northern Ontario and winter nesting sites in the United States.

Morning North15:08Re-establishing trumpeter swans in Northern Ontario

At one point, trumpeter swans had vanished from the northern Ontario landscape. They were reintroduced about 25 years ago. We take a look at how they're doing now.

In 1997 and 1998, those flying lessons were taking place on Sudbury's Kelly Lake, thanks to financial support from local mining giant Falconbridge.

"It was nice to see that the environment had improved so significantly in the Sudbury area over the '70s, '80s and '90s that the reintroduction of these species could be undertaken," said Joe Fyfe, who worked in the environmental department at Falconbridge for 31 years.

"There was an evolution through that period."

Fyfe says the reduction in local sulfur emissions and the re-greening of the Sudbury basin "largely pushed people to go the next step."

He says that saw Falconbridge put money into the restoration of peregrine falcons in the Sudbury area in the 1980s, setting the stage for the trumpeter swan program and a later drive to reintroduce musky into the Spanish River.

In the early 2000s, Blomme says there were other "experiments" where a handful of swans would be released onto Kelly Lake to see how they did. 

"You never know if they're coming back until they do so. Every step is an unpredictable one," he said. 

"The first day I saw them was very exciting. Way, way off in the distance I saw these four white blobs."

Blomme says it's not known which group of experimental swans the current population in northern Ontario is descended from.

And across the province, the population of trumpeter swans is estimated to be upwards of 3,000, thanks to daily tracking from volunteers with Trumpeter Swan Conservation Ontario.

"They got something we call in our group 'swan-itis,'" said president Susan Best. 

"We get hooked on them. When one flies over, it still, after 15 years of volunteering, gives me such a thrill."