HerKind.com

On June 13^th, after 37 days of incubation, four cygnets were born to a pair of Mute Swans nesting in Lost Lagoon. The hatching began at 9 am when the first ball of wet, grey down tumbled out of one of the eggs. At 2:30 pm a second cygnet burst out of its shell, this one ivory coloured, with unusually pink feet and a lighter grey beak that its sibling. Evidently exhausted from their efforts to break free of their embryonic shelters, the babies napped frequently while their parents waiting patiently for five more hours until the final two beaks started poking out of their eggs. The tiny grey “twins,” as they were dubbed, toppled out within a couple of minutes of each other at around 7:30 pm. Delight and relief were immeasurable among a group of Stanley Park “regulars” who had been keeping vigil at three swan nests since mid-April, as if their very presence would send positive energy for a healthy, new generation of Lost Lagoon swans. A week later, only one cygnet remained alive, the three others were killed, eaten or drowned. In the past few years, the hatching, and rearing of swans has been precarious at best, and rumours abound among this dynamic group of wildlife watchers as to why.

The Vancouver Parks board characterized this year’s cygnet hatching as a “miracle,” for more than one reason. At approximately 16.5 hectares in area, Lost Lagoon is thought to be much too small for more than one pair of nesting swans, since swans typically require an area at least the size of the whole of Stanley Park (1,000 acres) to accommodate the protectiveness they exhibit while they incubate, hatch and bring up their young. Two other female swans laid seven eggs each but all were lost, allegedly either from spoiling, predators like racoons and otters, or to humans. The four cygnets that did hatch were laid by a young mother who, at two years of age, had supposedly not yet reached reproductive maturity, since Mute Swans usually do not lay their first eggs until at least three years of age. Her partner is estimated to be in his twenties, and to never have successfully parented any young. Although swans habitually mate for life, this male’s partner died last year and it was his first mating season with a new, much younger female. Mike Mackintosh, of the Vancouver Parks Board, who has been involved with the swans in Stanley Park since the 1960s, is not concerned with their low birth rate. “The nine we have now is a much more realistic and manageable number.” In the past they were much larger in number in the park, and were kept company by a few Australian Black Swans that were subsequently stolen, and some native North American Trumpeters and Tundra Swans, that eventually moved on.

The Mute Swan is perhaps the most replicated of all the swans species in art, poetry and literature, and commercially in company logos, insignias, and advertising. This is the one species most known to people, due to the fact that it was introduced to North America from England over a hundred years ago, and lives in parks, lagoons and waterways across this continent, close to urban areas. Most Mute Swans are considered relatives to the “royal” English Swans, raised along the Thames River and therefore originally the property of the British royal family, except for a sub species known as Polish Mutes, who have pink feet, compared to the black of the English Mutes and, when mated with them produce a white or light coloured cygnet rather than the usual grey. They are admired for their natural, ornamental beauty (especially when they cup their wings above their backs) and, in their semi-domesticated homes in urban settings, they have learned to have little or no fear of humans, and are therefore susceptible to their attention.

The Mute Swans in Stanley Park are the descendants of the original number that were introduced from England in the park’s early history. Although the record keeping on the Stanley Park swans has been poor at best, Mike Mackintosh remembers that fifty years ago as many as seventy-five lived in the natural habitat of Beaver Lake and Lost Lagoon, which both provided plenty of what the Swans thrive on—a vegetarian diet consisting of pond weed, various grasses, and some invertebrates like insects, molluscs and tadpoles. Over the years, through natural attrition due to old age and death by predators, their numbers gradually dwindled. At certain points new swans were introduced in an effort to avoid inbreeding. The Mute Swans are distinguished from the native North American Trumpeter and Tundra Swans by their black knobs that protrude above their bright orange beaks (the knob is more pronounced in the male Mute, than the female). They are known for their territorial nature, especially during nesting periods, and in order to keep them from mixing with or moving the other species out of their migratory spots, the Mute Swans are required by law in Canada to be pinioned. This procedure, which is recommended to be done in the first 2-5 days in a cygnet’s life, but which is carried out three or four months into their life at Stanley Park, permanently prevents the swans from flight. The great debate about whether pinioning is humane or not remains unsettled, but by most accounts it is a relatively painless cut made in the wing of a young bird before it grows its flight feathers, so the swan is none the wiser about its ability to fly. The result is a bird that is perceived to be more domesticated, but which is still governed by the survival-of-the-fittest laws of nature, and any close observer of our Mutes can easily see that these two factors are in constant conflict these days in Lost Lagoon.

It is only since 1998 that the swans have begun reproducing again after a five-year dry spell, with only three cygnets surviving and growing to adulthood. Swans typically lay between three and seven eggs per season, so if they are in good reproductive health, they can hatch up to seven cygnets. In a protected and thriving environment, all seven would live to adulthood, mate and reproduce. In Lost Lagoon in 1998 three cygnets hatched, two of them died of a parasitic infection caused by algae in the lagoon, and one was killed by an off-leash dog. Out of the three hatched in 1999, two survived (one of them being the young mother of the four cygnets this year). And in 2000 one went missing and one lived. Many park regulars silently, and some openly, accuse the Parks Board of having an unspoken policy to control the number of swans in the Lagoon. As the Parks Board mandate is more about providing a natural, recreational playground for residents and tourists than it is about protecting the wildlife, many feel that it simply doesn’t care. Particularly unprotected are the swans, which are stuck here, in an inadequately small space, fighting for territory, their young vulnerable to too many close by predators, and a few known human repeat offender feeders. With the exception of Ziggy Jones, a park “wildlife technician” who, because they are not migratory, feeds the swans a supplemental amount of wheat grass, duck pellets, park staff cannot be everywhere at once keeping track of the wildlife in the park. An Eco-Rangers program is in effect in the summer months only, where twice a day volunteers go out into the park to remind visitors about the “no-feeding” by-law and to try to educate them on why feeding wildlife is harmful. Many of the prohibitive no-feeding signs are hidden by foliage, particularly in the lush spring and summer months. Mike Mackintosh admits that the Vancouver Parks Board needs to get more serious about enforcing the by-law, especially in light of recent coyote attacks. His lists of the problems feeding and overfeeding causes include overpopulation of wildlife, disturbance of natural balances, higher risk of wildlife disease, an increase of rodents and other pest species, habitat damage, and physical injuries to people,

This year, with only four swan eggs making it to hatching time, regulars commiserated that the Vancouver Parks Board was simply not being diligent enough to ensure a successful breeding season. A years-old rumour resurfaced about the Parks Board addling and spoiling the eggs, and then pointing media attention to wild predators or humans to cover up their below the radar agenda on control. Mike Mackintosh’s reply to that is, “Why would we want to shake the swan eggs, as if there is some kind of evil intent.” In fact the Parks Board does have a policy about rounding up Canada Geese, and limiting their large numbers. “In the case of the swans,” he says, ‘I just sort of shake my head and say, Get a Life!”

Among the group of regulars, there are distinctions as to which members have the best interests of the swans in mind, and those who have perhaps too much of an emotional investment in them and have forgotten that they are wildlife, and not mere pets, or worse, human. The former are lovers of waterfowl and wildlife alike and respectfully observe, take photos, and chat with other nature-lovers, as well as keep the Parks Board and Stanley Park Nature House (the two on-sight organizations) informed of any harm or mischief being perpetrated on park wildlife. The latter are the repeat feeders, who believe that there is not enough natural food in the Lagoon for the swans and have taken the care and feeding of them upon themselves, sometimes to a harmful conclusion.

The unofficial leader of the “swan-watchers” is a woman named Jean who, after many years of keeping an eye on park wildlife, has by far the best memory and documentation of the swans. She also knows who belongs on which side in terms of healthy and unhealthy interest in the swans, and pulls no punches when it comes to telling people not to feed them, get too close, or to please put their dog on a leash. Everyday throughout the spring during the transit strike, she travelled from New Westminster, walking into the park from the closest Skytrain station and could be found somewhere along the Lost Lagoon path, between the three swan nests. She kept copious notes on when each swan laid which egg and likely knew more accurately than the Stanley Park Nature House staff and the Parks Board itself about when the hatching would begin. She explained to any and all that hatching was not guaranteed and that even if the cygnets hatched, they may not live to adulthood. She happily showed off her photos from last year and she spoke lovingly about how the proud parents fuss over their young, described the cygnet’s first swim, and the way they ride the lagoon on the protective backs of their mothers, their little beaks peaking out from her wings. Her enthusiasm, tinged with sadness for the lost cygnets over the years, easily ignited interest in others about the pending births. Over the course of the time of the nesting, the group grew in number. Some members were first-timers, some old-timers, and all gravitated toward Jean to learn the latest progress of the swans. By the end of May it looked like only one set of swans would produce the coveted cygnets, and “regulars” could be seen peering over the fenced-off nest closest to the causeway as the hopeful parents stubbornly tended to their eggs, although they were long past their hatching date. Soon, all focus and anticipation was directed to the four remaining eggs in the middle nest. And what had started out as a few people strolling along the Lost Lagoon’s 1 km pathway had turned into a group of people with a common interest meeting to chat about life and nature in the company of the swans.

It is not surprising then that when the first two cygnets went missing, it was one of the “regulars” who first noticed, and another who found one of the bodies and brought it in to Ziggy Jones, the waterfowl caretaker. It was less than a week after their birth, and just as they were becoming experts at climbing on and off the nest to swim and learn to feed, trying to mimic their parents’ neck-dive to the bottom of the lagoon to forage for food. The speculation was that the inexperienced mother was lured to the opposite side of the lagoon by “the swan lady” who claims to have raised them for more than thirteen years by feeding them abundant amounts of food, sometimes bird seed, often times cat food. The swan, clearly used to being fed by this woman, took her young too often into the territory of the other swans that were still in their defensive nesting mode, despite losing their eggs. As well, they were much easier prey for herons, crows and other predators on the open lagoon. After several witnessed battles between the male swans, it was concluded that the grandfather of the cygnets (the male of the unsuccessful “causeway” pair) finally found one of them swimming too far from the protective wing of its mother. Ms. Jones sent the found body off for a necropsy and to date, two months later, the results are not known. After that the parents became more cautious, but the food on the other side of the lagoon still held a fascination for the mother and off she went, continually putting her two remaining cygnets in danger. A few days later one more cygnet vanished and Ms. Jones took the final one into protective custody at an undisclosed place in Stanley Park, where she is raising it in a wading pool for the next few months. She plans to first place it in a farm yard in the park, and by fall she will put it back into the lagoon. She is aware that by then even the cygnet’s parents may not recognize it and that no matter when she re-introduces it could prove dangerous, but she maintains that in the fall, with the nesting season long over, the Lagoon is a quieter, more tranquil place, where the swans co-exist more peacefully. She has based this decision on her six years of experience looking after the Stanley Park waterfowl, her own rearing of birds and plenty of pertinent reading. As a “wildlife technician” for Stanley Park, she has no related educational credentials, and expresses frustration with the Parks Board’s budgetary constraints on wildlife protection. When asked if she consulted waterfowl experts on her decision to take the cygnet away from its parents she replies, “I don’t even have a computer.”

As many people as there are who want the cygnet protected, there are likely as many who think it should have been left to nature’s order. This is the gist of Zoe Renaud’s response to whether or not a cygnet should be taken from its parents at such a young age. As a certified wildlife rehabilitator, at the Wildlife Rescue Association in Burnaby, she receives many calls about injured or abandoned birds and animals and empathizes with Ms. Jones on her decision to remove the cygnet. “When you pinion the swans you basically turn them into a domesticated animal. In the wild a cygnet would never be taken from the protection of its parents. In Stanley Park the worst that can happen is that it will be forced away from the flock of swans and rely on the companionship of humans.” Ms. Renaud also understands that this falls into the other risk categories of over domestication of wildlife. “There is no right or wrong answer here,” she says, “They are already living unnaturally.”

Melanie Beeson, founder of the Swan Sanctuary in Surrey, England advises that our cygnet is quite special as it is in fact a Polish Mute which, she says, tend to be more delicate. “I would say a Polish cygnet tends to need his parents that little bit more. This could be why you’ve lost cygnets in previous years.” She recommends reintroducing the cygnet sooner than later to diminish the risk of rejection.

For the first time in many years, the swans basked in the limelight of media attention. The Vancouver Sun carried a daily account of the life of the cygnets, and both VTV and Global Television featured segments on them. Many regulars were reluctant to speak on camera or be quoted in print and were so protective of the swans and their story that one reporter, sensing a conspiratorial air, commented, “This is about the swans isn’t it?” What was really happening was wariness about the way ordinary people had been implicated in the media as part of the problem, and frustration with the misrepresentation of the swans as vicious, or neglectful parents. The oft quoted Ziggy Jones claims that she was misquoted in the stories. After allowing the Vancouver Sun a photo of the cygnet in its new home, she is refusing any other media access for the time being. That photo, and another one just published clearly shows the cygnet to be “ivory” the second born with white down and pink feet, who possesses the less common genes of the Polish Mute, and therefore is a rarity. “No,” says Ziggy, “it’s the second lightest one.” Several photographs taken by the regulars prove, however, that there was never a second lightest coloured cygnet in the clutch. The others were the typical grey colour, with dark beaks and black feet. All are mystified by this confusion and await the day they can actually see the young swan, whose gender also won’t be known until it is taken to the vet for pinioning in another month or so.

“She loosed her hair and let down her tresses, which covered the whole of her body like a veil…”

Lenny Kravitz tells a story about how a year after his mom died, he took an entire year off and went to Barbados with his daughter and father to grieve and heal and just be. The first order of business when he got back, he said, was to cut off his dread locks. He said that the last ten years of his life—good and bad—were invested in his hair. The moment his friend began cutting, he started to hyperventilate with the palpable loss of a part of his past, most of which was okay with him, he was done with it.

I did the same thing today. I did it quite unceremoniously and if anything, it is the lack of ceremony about it that is bothering me now.

I never thought I’d be a girl who would cry over a haircut. And on the surface of it I am not. After all, I have had short hair most of my life. I only started growing it after mom died. It became a freedom thing, and then it became a writing thing. When I began writing my book about my dead sister I vowed to never cut my hair (trims not included) until it was written. Why? I’m not sure, but if I had to approximate my best guess to my own motivation it would be that when my hair is long, I can kinda see the resemblance everyone loves to talk about. Especially when braided, though I have no living memory of her with woven hair. And I guess I figured the more I conjure her to life, the truer the writing will be. Or something.

Today, I cut three inches off my hair, a substantial amount. Enough to feel like I broke the vow since the book is nowhere near finished. My hair was half way down my back, completely covered my breasts in the front (a visual I was becoming fond of), and it was longer than I ever knew I could grow it. My last trim was in April, so my hair had the energy of a long, hard spring / summer of sadness, loneliness, fear, joy and forward movement inside its strands.

Ever since I wrote in these pages about being the blond baby my mother spent years praying for, the undue and misdirected attention I garnered because of that accidental infamy, the problems it has unnecessarily caused in my family, and the way it dictated the me I became instead of the me I am—ever since then, I have been itching to do something with my hair. A clean break. I thought about cutting it completely off, or becoming brunette, or cutting it completely off and becoming brunette. Something, anything to signify a shift out of the past, a change of focus. An initiation of sorts some new, uncharted pathways. Also, suddenly all former boyfriends, paramours, lovers and crushes were interested in or carrying on with brunettes. The hair dilemma was started to talk on mythic proportions. And maybe I was looking for a quick fix.

So, on a whim, and not wanting to spend a lot of money, I took myself off to Great Clips hair cutters over on Davie Street, sat in the chair and said, "a trim please." Well, if you know my hair, you know it is so thick that it needs to be completely saturated to be wet enough to cut, and having no prior discounted haircut experience, I did not know that they do not even shampoo your hair for $14, just sprits it with a spray bottle. So the hair ended up being cut, not trimmed due to the fact that some was wet, some was dry, further complicated by the fact that I had worn it in braids the day before so it was kinkier than usual and the very nice lady had to keep cutting to get any semblance of evenness. 

(I might add at this point that my mother was once a hairdresser and I felt slightly like I was sitting for her while the very nice lady sprayed strands of hair and cut them, knowing that later I would look at the wonky cut and say, why didn’t I spend some money on my hair??)

Sure enough, I walked out with too short, semi-wet hair and came home to wash and style and cry.

In actual fact, it is still quite long, but for purposes of my unprecedented hair trauma I might just as well have shaved my head bald! In the end, it’s as Marcel Proust says, "The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes." And I guess this applies to hair too. I’ll have to find another way of launching myself into newness, ‘cause obviously I still have way too much invested in my mane of golden locks!

November 2001

What a difference a year makes. Last September I, like so many others, sat glued to my television set watching blow-by-blow coverage of Princess Diana’s death. I watched Diana’s funeral, not once, but many times. I listened to Charles Spencer’s eulogy over and over, and cried every time, as if repetition could somehow make it all true. Why did I do this? What was I waiting to see, to hear? What emotion locked deep inside was this spectacle tapping into? Flipping back and forth between channels for coverage and critical comment, I told myself that my interest was media deconstruction and trying to attach some meaning to the phenomenon of millions upon millions of mourners displaying emotions that they’d perhaps bottled up for months, even years. Feelings maybe not even their loved ones knew they possessed.

When I spoke to my mother about it all her attitude struck me as somewhat cynical and I was bothered by that. She was critical of Diana’s public persona, her courting and shunning of the media. And although she also watched, she seemed unaffected and unimpressed. But then my mom was no stranger to grief. As a young child she had lost her mother, then later, her oldest daughter before her youngest were grown, and two siblings far too early. All too often she’d been attending funeral after funeral as family members and friends succumbed to age or illness. Of course, she knew then what I know now. Something that my multiple viewing of Diana’s funeral was in some strange way foreshadowing. Once you’ve lived through the real thing, you have little or no appetite for voyeuristic viewing of death via “breaking news” broadcast venues.

It never occurred to me last September as I watched and participated in the Diana display, that two short months later I’d be sitting panic-stricken at my own mother’s funeral mass. Nothing in my life could have prepared me for standing in a room full of caskets choosing one for my mother’s dead body. Or, greeting every single family member and friend at her visitation, their presence creating a domino effect of memory of her life and my own. Nothing could ever be further from my mind than the few torturous minutes it took me, on rubbery legs, to walk up the church aisle behind her coffin. The fact that my private feelings would be publicly seen felt overwhelming and I remember trying to hide my face even from the familiar and also grieving gathering of people who knew and loved my mother.

Watching anniversary commentary and coverage of Diana now is excruciating to me. Suddenly my tolerance for anything funereal is drastically diminished. Reality, after all, is not at all entertaining. It’s painful in a way that only becomes obvious in the many months that follow – even almost a whole year later when I no longer expect to still remember the details so acutely. When what has forever changed my life is a faint memory to those around me. When nothing and no-one can relieve the emptiness of not hearing her voice for so many days in a row. After weeks and months of the processing and reprocessing that it takes to fully understand that the kind of comfort her voice provided is no longer available to me. The refuge of my mother’s love—custodian of my memories, champion of my successes, holder of my tears, my own personal spin-doctor—will sadly never be enough as a mere memory.

Remembering how much courage I had to muster for my brief walk makes it impossible to think of what it took for Diana’s young sons to walk through the streets of London behind their mother. In order to purge a collective grief that probably had nothing whatever to do with the woman in that box, we forced two terribly impressionable boys to experience an extremely private moment right in front of far too many hungry eyes. Who can ever forget the picture of the word “mummy” peaking out among the flowers atop Diana’s coffin? Not at all lost on me then, it has since taken on a much more poignant significance, and beauty.

For me, the death of my mother means the loss of my main relationship, my closest friend and my strongest connection to my personal history. But by this time, this is not outwardly noticeable. Inside myself, however, everything has shifted so that even the tiniest occurrence takes much longer to process, leaving me with a block of confusion in my brain. I still need time and space to adjust to profound and unalterable loss. This fact is difficult to articulate in the real world of grief, where people need to see that you’re “coping” well. Sometimes I think we have more empathy for the loved one’s of dead public figures because we can measure their loss without asking questions whose answers make us afraid for ourselves. It’s less messy with the protection of a television screen.

Ironically, I would have shared these observations with my mother first—a person whose point of view was both familiar and surprising, my daily breath of fresh air. Had I more experience with the extremely personal after-affects of the loss of a loved one, I would have agreed with her about Diana. So, now when I reflect back on our differing opinions on the subject, I just know my mom is up there somewhere beyond the ether hearing me say: “Hey Mom - how come you’re always right?”

September 1998

Growing up Italian and Catholic there was never a doubt that church-going would be a regular part of my life. My mother was devout, me and my sisters were in the choir, my brother did his stint as an alter boy. My oldest sister and her husband’s entire courtship (age 13 on) happened in and around St. Francis of Assisi church in Toronto. My father drove us to church every Sunday and waited in the car for the duration. He had a private spirituality, I guess.

As a terribly fidgety child, easily bored, my mother used to give me her rosary to play with. My sister Frances and I (always partners in childhood crimes) would sit on the kneelers and invent games using the beaded circle with the dangling string. Even though we watched our grandmother pray with her rosary every night in her downstairs apartment in our house, it never occurred to us that the beads all meant something different and that praying with the rosary was an intensified form of devotional prayer. On the church pews while the monotone of the mass droned on, Frances and I were oblivious to the stares of disdain from strangers directed toward my mother and us. We played and giggled and fought over who got to hold the rosary.

Years later, after turning away from Catholicism, and completely out of practice about the mechanics of the mass, I began going to church as a way of remembering and feeling close to my mother after her death. Often, at lunch hour, I would attend the mass at St. Patrick’s church, close to my work place, listen to the familiar poetry of the mass, and cry. Afterwards, I’d stay to listen to the old Filipino ladies pray the Rosary in barely audible tones in a foreign language. Kneeling at the pew, I’d look around at the stain glass windows, the elaborate depictions of Jesus at various stages of torture on the cross and then rest my eyes on the women, bowed in deep prayer to Mother Mary and the Holy Trinity.

I wonder about faith, what it really is, how to have it and keep it in my life. I think about the overriding quality my mother’s life encompassed, which was grace. And somehow in my mind, I attach it to her devotion first to God and the church and then to everything she loved and believed in.

When I moved halfway across the country my sister sent my grandmother’s glow in the dark rosary, handed down. I keep it in a box by my bed and take it out to look at it sometimes. I still don’t know how to pray it. But holding it gives me comfort and reminds me that grace, above all else, is one of the truest qualities to possess, and probably the easiest to attain -- once you understand its effect on your life.

September 2004

Trust is a huge problem for me. In that mixed up way where you trust everyone because it’s in your natural, original heart to do so. But you also trust noone. So you give and take back all at the same time and leave your friends and lovers wondering if their coming or going. And you feel enormous love and pain all at once. Joy becomes too intermingled with terror and wariness and it’s hard to live in this one moment of your life for fear of what the next one holds. And you wear yourself right to the bone with the knowledge that you are so fragile inside when outside you seem so strong, so impenetrable. When people tell you you’re hard to reach you think how impossibly untrue that is. Only it’s true to them. And you still can’t get to the deep down place of truth where it’s okay to say, listen, you’ve got it all wrong. I am not that hard. Inside the shell is jelly--soft, malleable, gooey and it’ll cling to you if you’re not careful, if I’m not. And also inside are some big huge hollow holes of wanting. And fear of everything that I want.  So I tell people, I’m afraid to get on an airplane but I’m not afraid to give you my heart. But that's not entirely true. Because I’m not really giving it. I’m offering it up broken, and asking them to heal it. And that’s no gift.

November 2001