Photo credit: Gem Carryl.
Last Friday at noon, in a press conference at Italian Lake, the city celebrated the arrival of some seasonal guests—a pair of white swans, soon to be joined by a pair of black ones, that will live at the Uptown park through the end of summer.
“They’re just beautiful animals,” Wendell Hoover, a local realtor and a member of the Friends of Italian Lake neighborhood group, told WGAL. “Just in the last two days I’ve seen so many people stop and take pictures with them.”
The neighborhood group is renting the swans, at a cost of $400, from a Halifax farm. Aside from their beauty, the birds are apparently prized for their sense of turf—an Illinois company, Knox Swan & Dog, rents swans out in teams with a border collie to chase Canada geese off properties throughout the Chicagoland area. (“Got geese? Get rid of them with a Knox Swan & Dog Package,” the website advertises.)
“We actually hope they might limit the geese population a little bit by protecting their turf and their area,” Harrisburg Mayor Eric Papenfuse said of the city’s summer visitors. “Sometimes the lake can get overwhelmed with geese. So, we’re thinking this could help create a more natural balance.”
Territorial instincts notwithstanding, the swans did not immediately take to their new digs. Hoover recounted the day the farmer dropped them off, having delivered them in a large dog crate in a minivan. “She’s comfortable with handling swans,” he said. “I would not be. She grabbed them and just threw them in the lake.” They promptly swam to the opposite side and climbed out of the water.
But, Hoover said, the swans “really changed a lot” in the days that followed. “Now they’ll go anywhere. They’re very comfortable. When we put food out there, they come right up.”
By Monday morning, when the two birds glided along the western edge of the lake, they seemed to do so with an air less of exploration than patrol. Wherever the swans drifted, the geese tended to recede. They slid across the water, their necks and their layered wings so still they could almost be mistaken for decoys.
It appeared word had spread sufficiently to draw a few admirers. An amateur photographer, holding up a long zoom lens, snapped shots from the shade of a maple tree. A trio of three older women circled the lake, drawing close enough to the swans for one of them to take a few pictures on her phone.
Syretta Oakes, a preschool teacher at the nearby Little Geniuses Preparatory Academy, off Linglestown Road, led six toddlers in a “nature walk” along the lake’s edge. “I was just so shocked to see the swans,” she said. She remembered how, back in the mid-90s, several swans lived in Italian Lake. But by the time she moved to the city, in 2009, they were all gone. “To see them back is awesome.”
The swans started diving for food on the lake bed, their necks slipping into the water with precision, as if they were threading invisible tunnels. “Guess what?” asked one little genius, speaking more or less in Oakes’ direction. “Sometimes when they’re afraid they go under water.”
Francine Feinerman, who has lived Uptown for nearly 50 years, remembered having swans in the old days, too. “We hardly ever saw geese,” she said. “You saw mostly swans.” According to her, they were removed because young troublemakers were throwing stones at them. “That’s why I’m so nervous,” she went on. “I’m hoping the kids will learn respect.”
During Friday’s press conference, Papenfuse had also asked residents to suggest some names to give the birds during their stay. By the end of the day, Jaime Johnsen, the atrium receptionist in city hall, had drafted a flyer petitioning people to “Name That Swan.” The design, in keeping with the municipal government’s late spirit of thrift, was decidedly lo-fi: a clip-art doodle of a black and white swan, with the digital watermark still visible; some swooping word-processor calligraphy.
“My friend was like, ‘Why do the black ones gotta be late?’” said Johnsen Monday afternoon, in between fielding walk-ins at her desk just inside city hall. “She’s not from here. She was like, ‘That’s racist.’ I was like, ‘No, no, no, no, no.’”
As part of her job, Johnsen also checks the messages on the city’s 311 system and monitors the neighborhood-based social network Nextdoor. Under a post by the city, she reviewed the handful of potential swan names submitted so far: John, Paul, George and Ringo; Ron Swanson; and, facetiously, Swanny McSwanface, inspired by “Boaty McBoatface,” the name submitted in a recent contest to christen a British research vessel, which won handily in an online poll.
“It does make it a beautiful atmosphere down there,” Johnsen went on. She flipped through a couple of photos of the lake on her phone, in which the swans, either because of a photo filter or a trick of the light, appeared surrounded by a soft-focus glow. “It makes it kind of nice,” she said. “The geese all stay to one side. And it’ll be even more beautiful when the flowers come.”
