In Memory of Harry Lumsden

Harry Lumsden

The episode I did on Trumpeter Swans (note - no longer available. Long story) used to be all about Harry Lumsden.

As I researched trumpeter swans and their fraught history in Canada, his name kept coming up. Of course it did. Because it turns out that he was the most important single person in bringing trumpeter swans back from the brink of extinction in Ontario. He would have probably denied that though. I got the sense he was pathologically humble. 

Harry Lumsden had been a Ministry of Natural Resources biologist. But after a career of field work, he was almost retired when he decided to dedicate himself to the trumpeter swan. In 1982, he received a shipment of trumpeter swan eggs and convinced landowners in Ontario to raise the cygnets from those eggs until there were enough swans to release in the wild and let them have a go of it (relatively) unsupervised. 

 It was his unwavering commitment that pressed on even after the initial efforts seemed hopeless. And in the end he saw his faith rewarded - he got to watch as trumpeter swans made their miraculous comeback and were removed from the endangered species list. He received a Governer General’s award and the Order of Canada for his work. When asked about them by Valerie Pring, a writer for Lake Simcoe Living, he said: “Please don’t say anything about this stuff, I don’t want to give the impression that I’m more than I actually am. I just like swans.” Sorry, Harry. But you are more than you actually are.

My first edit of the trumpeter swan episode name-checked him quite a bit. He was our central character. But there was an obvious problem. Without Harry actually on screen, it started to feel like the visuals and the narration were telling two different stories. As much as I loved the man and his singular quest, the feedback I got was unanimous. The specificity of the story I was telling demanded matching visuals, and I didn’t have them. The format I was committed to didn’t have interviews, and tended to avoid people on screen in general. 

So Harry’s name got scrubbed from the episode. It’s still his story, he’s just absent from it. It all became ‘the conservation efforts’, not ‘Harry’s conservation efforts’. It did the trick. The episode played much better when those details were kept vague. Seeing only footage of swans was much more palatable if the story around them was from a bird’s-eye (so to speak) view and not from the POV of someone like Harry Lumsden.

In the back of my head I always thought about reaching out to him. It felt odd to be telling his story without at least letting him know. And who knows, maybe an interview. Part of me just wanted to talk to the guy. In everything I read, he seemed so simply decent. And if nothing else I wanted to join the chorus of people thanking him for what he had devoted himself to, and for sticking with it.

I never did. By the time I would have reached out, the episode had been rewritten to scrub his name from the narration. And then, as I was doing some follow-up, I found out that now, I never will get to talk to him. He died in February - a month shy of his 99th birthday, but still too soon. 

Seeing the news had an effect on me I didn’t expect. I guess because I had gotten within a stone’s throw of reaching out and now regretted not doing so when I had the chance. I didn’t know the guy, I had never talked to him, but the sense of loss was palpable.

In the original script for the trumpeter swan episode, I ended on an image of Harry Lumsden pulled from an article I read. I hated losing the ending. So I’m going to recycle it here, because it’s my favourite thing I learned about him.

It seemed like Harry Lumsden never considered his work ‘finished’. He continued to advocate passionately and present papers until the end of his life. But if he did occasionally bask in victory, he did so on a large property with four ponds. And, no surprise, those ponds are home to trumpeter swans.

Trumpeter swans are not long-distance migrators. They over-winter in Canada. But to survive, they need open water, and the ponds on Harry’s property are small and placid, and freeze over quickly.

So every day, into his ninth decade, he would go out and break up the ice for the swans.

Harry Lumsden deserves to be remembered. And I feel a pretty selfish sense of loss about his death. I just want to live in a world with more people like him, not less.