LaSalle Park - January 2025
It took me way too long to visit LaSalle Park, nestled in the protective bay of Hamilton harbour. It’s a small, unassuming 57-acres and marina with one very particular claim to fame: due to an almost arbitrary trip taken by one swan many years ago, it now plays host to a winter gathering of trumpeter swans every year.
I’m very much hoping that the follow-up to the first extended Canadianimals episode, about the Ontario Salmon Run, will be about the extinction and reintroduction of Trumpeter Swans to the province. So, over the past year, I’ve been visiting a lot of their landmarks.
LaSalle did not disappoint. In a little inlet further protected by the marina docks, the water is positively thick with swans, geese, ducks and gulls. Get there early in the morning and you can watch flocks take off and land.
And, it being a known quantity and a public, easily accessible park, you’re usually joined by other like-minded folks. I had a couple of delightful conversations with swan-enthusiasts and conservationists while I was down there. On my second trip, after re-affirming that any benefit to taking a drone out here would be far outweighed by the potential disturbance to the birds, I heard that familiar buzz up above by someone without my scruples operating one from the warmth of their car in the marina parking lot. And half the people you see at the shore are sporting imposing telephoto lenses.
LaSalle did not disappoint for filming purposes either. The swans are very comfortable with people, and when I plonked a GoPro on a gorilla grip right at the water line a couple younger ones tried delicately to eat it - great footage. I even caught a rare visible sunrise one of the days I went down there in this otherwise grey and overcast Canadian winter.