After 30 years of park service, Dave Lang's swan song Friday

Dave Lang retired Friday as caretaker of Harrison Park’s birds.

Visitors put the equivalent of one quarter for each of Owen Sound’s 21,000-plus residents in the corn dispensers for the birds every year, he said. “I think it’s probably the number one attraction in Owen Sound.”

The mix of penned exotic pheasants and peacocks originating in the Himalayas and China and domestics, including transient ducks and Canada geese, has delighted young and old for generations.

According to park lore, others before him were known as the Great Keeper of the Swans, or the like. Maybe that harkens to the 1912 donation of four swans, two white and two black, a gift from King George V to then-Mayor Elias Lemon.

Ten years later, a menagerie of exotic birds including peacocks and other rare birds, deer, coyotes, badgers, racoons and other animals were all displayed there.

Lang, an athletic-looking 56-year-old, began as a seasonal park worker in June 1990. In 1994 he took over full-time responsibility caring for the birds, the deer and rabbits too, when they were kept there, while also serving as a park arborist.

In earlier days, he gave the swans, the most regal of birds, comically inauspicious names including General, Chip, Turbo, Buddy and Terminator. But each reflected their histories or idiosyncrasies revealed to him during his close work with them.

They’ve been like workmates who kept him company when the tedium of the day descended. He fed them, adjusted their diets to better suit their needs, cleaned their pens and recently built new cages as one of the two bird barns is too old to use.

“It’s almost like they’re part of the family. Most of our staff look at it that way too; they’re always talking about the birds, if they’re doing something funny or if they’re fighting or anything like that.”

Harrison Park’s long-time bird caretaker and arbourist, Dave Lang, built the bird-display pens with a colleague recently, to better showcase the birds, which he thinks may be the city’s biggest, free attraction. He retired Friday, May 29, 2020 after 30 years’ park service. (Scott Dunn/The Sun Times/ Postmedia Network)

He’s been like a shepherd, watching over his sheep, he said. Lately, he’s been sharing knowledge gained over the past 25 years with Brock Karn, the park’s other arborist, who will take good care of the birds, Lang said.

After the violent deaths of two swans in the park in 2007 by teens, Lang quit naming the birds. He and another man found one of the dead birds the morning after it was killed, an ordeal which affected Lang.

“After that I never named the birds … not to get too attached. Because we used to have birds down here, swans that would come right up to us, we’d pat them and stuff like that,” he said.

“It was pretty much after that every day was come down here, making sure nothing was injured,” he said. “You give anything a name and all of a sudden it becomes more than just a bird.”

He finds it peculiarly quiet in the park now.

COVID-19 virus restrictions to limit spread of the pandemic mean there are no excited kids’ squealing in the playgrounds, no wood fires in the campground, only birdsong – and geese honking like it’s Saturday night at the Bayshore.

It’s “surreal” to experience it and particularly odd to be retiring amid it, he said.

COVID concerns forbid goodbye gatherings and anyway, with people laid off, “it doesn’t really seem right” to have a big celebration, he said. Five minutes were taken the day before to mark his retirement, he said.

“I make fun with the guys, I say jeez I’m retiring and not even gonna get a handshake!”

Unknown to Lang, there was cake waiting for him Friday afternoon.

Lang’s supervisor, Kristan Shrider walked by the bird barn as the interview wound down there. She recalled she visited Lang to learn more about his job when she started five years ago. He got her to help put eye-drops in a bird’s eye.

“That’s the thing that I think a lot of people don’t realize,” she said. “It’s these things that will be missed so much and aren’t highlighted enough, I don’t think, and they’re not celebrated enough.”

Lang is optimistic about the birds’ future in the park. He thinks the city recognizes their popularity and wants them to be showcased well.

“If you get a guy like me that loves animals, compassionate and cares about their well-being and their health, I think this will continue being a nice place to come and visit” and it’s free-of-charge, Lang added.

“I don’t know of another bird display where people can come to a park of this calibre, being in a valley with a river running through it.”