People fed bread to these baby swans at the Scarborough Bluffs. Now they’ll never live in the wild again

Three of their baby swans died soon after they hatched. And this week, the two others were taken away when they began to show signs of a wing deformity that will leave them orphaned and unable to ever return to the wild. The suspected cause is feeding by humans of bread and other heavily processed foods.

It’s an all-too-common — and entirely preventable — scenario that plays out every year across the GTA.

Ann Brokelman, a volunteer for the Toronto Wildlife Centre, saw the pair of baby swans last week and they were fine. Two days later, she got a call: They have angel wings.

Despite the heavenly name, the term refers to a deformity caused in part by nutritional deficiencies and high levels of sugars and carbs in a bird’s diet.

A swan’s normal intake consists of grass, aquatic plants and some aquatic invertebrates, according to Kate Purvis of the Shades of Hope Wildlife Refuge, where the swans were taken. But when they fill up on bread from humans, they stop eating what they need to.

“Basically, they’re filling up on McDonald’s and not eating their salad,” Purvis said.

In juvenile birds, that diet of junk food can cause the last joint of their wings to twist outward, poking out from their side instead of lying flush with the rest of their body. And with wings like that, the bird can’t fly.

No flying means no migration. So when every other bird in the flock takes off for warmer weather, the angel-winged teenager will be grounded, left alone in the cold Canadian winter.

The water might freeze over, cutting off access to aquatic food. Worse yet, the bird itself may be frozen in the ice. If a predator comes stalking, no flying could mean no escape.

And this is not a problem unique to the Scarborough Bluffs. Earlier this month in Burlington, the Royal Botanical Gardens threatened to close its trails if people kept feeding young swans. Purvis sees at least 20 cases of angel wings every year, mostly with Canada geese.

If angel wings are caught early in a bird’s development, it can be fixed. The bones are still soft, so wildlife centres like Shades of Hope bandage the bird’s wings in their natural position to keep them there.

If the bird is young, it may only take a week until they’re healthy. If the bird is older, it may take months. In adults, angel wings are untreatable.

For the two Scarborough swans, Purvis estimates it will be at least a month until the treatment is complete.

Then the other shoe falls. Those swans are now orphans.

“By the time we’ve finished treating them, their parents will have given up on them coming back,” Purvis said. “We essentially had to kidnap them to try and fix their wings. They’ve now lost the opportunity to learn and grow.”

Importantly, there’s no one to lead them south in migration. So the swans will be released to monitored ponds where they can be tracked, and will never return to the wild — or to their parents, Mango and Charlotte.

“Now they have no babies,” Brokelman said. “It makes me sick to know that that’s happened and it’s not the first time. That’s the part that’s hard — knowing that it’s preventable.”