THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Tuesday, March 28, 1995 TAG: 9503280010
SECTION: FRONT PAGE: A15 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Opinion
SOURCE: George Hebert
LENGTH: Medium: 68 lines
Black squirrels were an expected wildlife dividend on the recent late-winter trip that took my wife and me north of the border. We weren't disappointed. At several woody locations in the agricultural stretches of Ontario, just as they had performed for us in a Toronto park on an earlier visit, the little inky furballs scampered about.
We also anticipated deer, and were rewarded. They didn't pop up on the roadside as often as the deer-crossing signs suggested they might happen, but late one afternoon, not far north of Lake Erie in serene farm country, we passed a herd - 50 or so - grazing and moseying about. Never had seen a wild troop that big.
We felt sure, too, that we'd see Canada geese, and we were right. Plenty of honkers almost everywhere.
As for treats we didn't expect, there was a red squirrel, a thin, rusty blur as it streaked across a cemetery where Donna was checking gravestones for early family members.
But most unexpected and pleasurable of all were repeated sightings of one of North America's largest waterfowl.
It had been quite a few years since we'd seen - in the Currituck Sound region of North Carolina - wintering batches of the great and graceful whistling swan.
While visiting a museum at Simcoe, a local resident suggested that one of the finest current attractions in that part of Ontario was to be found a few miles over on the marshy edge of Erie. In and around a refuge at Long Point, she suggested we might see some of these birds, stopping over on their way from the Atlantic shore to breeding grounds on the continent's Arctic rim.
We went, and there they were.
Heads towering, on stately necks, over the ducks and geese roundabout, they stood reflectively on plates of thin ice, or floated in snowy splendor in the stretches of water that warming air had opened up. We found a place on the Long Point road to pull off, and sat watching for a quite a while.
That wasn't all the show, either. After we had turned around and were leaving the area, we had to stop again to admire several arriving formations in the air. These were easily identified as tundra swan (the more standard name nowadays for the whistlers). Their rigid necks stuck out an incredible distance in front of their bodies and wings. And feathering was totally white, in contrast to the snow geese with their black-splashed wings, great noisy crowds of which were also in the area. (These last are another breed familiar to us here on the Atlantic coast, where many thousands of them keep winter company with the swans.)
And there was still more, there in lake-side Ontario. Every day or so after that we would see a quonking procession (there's more quonk than whistle to my ears) of the big whites, or perhaps a splendidly organized ``V'' of them, go sailing by. One bright morning, looking up from that aforementioned cemetery of the red squirrel, we gawked at string after string, wedge after wedge - swans in the hundreds.
And amid all this, we learned that travelers from elsewhere - like ourselves and quite a few who had parked alongside us here and there to look and marvel - were not the only or most enthusiastic of those cheering the beautiful birds and their proclamation of spring's nearness.
On at least three signs, in three different places, we saw in large letters:
``They're Back!'' MEMO: Mr. Hebert is a former editor of The Ledger-Star. by CNB