Spring in Lambton County, from the Bog to the Bay

Every March, before the fields are dry enough to work, the flats between Thedford and Grand Bend fill with tundra swans. They come up from the Atlantic coast, where they spend the winter around Chesapeake Bay, on their way to nesting grounds on the Arctic tundra, and this corner of Lambton is one of the places they stop to rest and feed. In a good year there can be as many as fifteen thousand, white against black soil, and the sound reaches the car before the birds do.

They land here because of what the land used to be. The ground behind the Pinery dunes was once three shallow lakes, Lake Smith, Lake George and Lake Burwell, and the settlers called the whole basin the Drowned Lands. It was drained for farming more than a century ago, but every spring the melt and the rain put water back into the low fields for a few weeks, and the swans find last year's leftover corn and grain under it. The Lambton Shores guide tells the story of the drained lakes. The swans are its annual footnote.

Tell the children what they are looking at. A tundra swan weighs about as much as a large turkey and flies a loop of some six thousand kilometres a year, Chesapeake Bay to the Arctic and back, in family groups that stay together through the first winter. Most have a small yellow spot in front of the eye on the black bill; that is the mark that separates a tundra swan from the bigger trumpeter swan, whose bill is all black. Older field guides call them whistling swans.

The Lambton Heritage Museum marks the return of the swans every March, with an exhibit, a viewing spot on the bog behind it, and daily estimates of how many have arrived. Go on a still morning, stay on the road shoulder, and bring binoculars if you have them. The birds keep their distance, and so should you.

The bay end of this guide is Sarnia, where Lake Huron narrows into the St. Clair River under the Blue Water Bridge. Canatara Park sits on the lake just north of the bridge, with a beach, Lake Chipican and the Seaway Kiwanis Animal Farm inside it, and in April it is the easiest spring outing in the county: free, close, and different every week.

Start at the water. The beach is empty in spring, the lake is too cold for anything but a toe, and the sand is covered in what the winter left behind: driftwood, smooth stones, the odd ledge of ice still melting in the shade. It is the best beachcombing of the year, and nobody is asking you to leave by dark. Walk toward the point and you can see the bridge and, most days, a freighter.

The freighters are their own spring event. The Soo Locks at Sault Ste. Marie close for the winter and reopen on March 25 every year, and within days the big lake boats are running again, each one passing under the Blue Water Bridge on its way into or out of Lake Huron. The Point Edward waterfront under the bridge is as close as you can stand to one without being on it. The Sarnia guide has the bridge, the tunnel and the river.

Then the animal farm, run by the Humane Society with the Seaway Kiwanis Club and the City. It is free, with a donation box for the animals, and if your timing is right in spring you might get to see the new baby lambs; ask what else has been born since the snow went. The trail around Lake Chipican takes twenty minutes at a child's pace, and the herons are back on the pond by the end of April.