Soaring high over the district in an ultralight aircraft, looking down on lakes, islands, rivers, and granite, Bill Lishman feels in his element.
Tempted by the prospect of clear skies and plenty of landing room on area lakes, the 70-year-old airman - best known for his work escorting Canada geese to southern wintering grounds, a story retold in the 1996 film "Fly Away Home" - was in Parry Sound in August, adventuring aboard the lightweight amphibious machine he loves so much.
"I think we all have an envy of birds, because it's three-dimensional freedom," he said sitting on a couch at a friend's cottage, waiting for the wind to die down.
As a kid born in Pickering just before the outbreak of the Second World War, Lishman says, he dreamed of being a fighter pilot. But in the days when signals from ground to pilots were made with flares and lanterns, being colour-blind kept him sulking on the tarmac.
"In the 50s, when I tried to get my licence, they wouldn't pass my medical because of the colour-blindness," he says. "Of course you didn't need to be licensed to fly hang gliders... so that's where I got into flying."
From the 70s through to the early 80s Lishman says he survived the prototypical stages of ultralight design, since the early versions were nothing more than powered hang-gliders.
"You're learning to fly while you're being a test pilot," he says. "There's a lot of guys who started out doing that who didn't survive."
The experience, he says, is like no other in the air since you travel at incredibly low-speed with a fully open cockpit and all the time in the world to take in the surroundings.
"It's like having your own personal mountain top," he says. "You get out on a nice clear night, like we did last night, it's just spectacular."
He said he's had a few close shaves in his time, but mostly in the beginning when unreliable engines made ultralighting a bit iffy.
"I've had 26 engine outs," he says smiling. "But I'm living proof that they're safe. I've had 26 force landings and only twice bent the landing gear. That's out of thousands of takeoffs and landings."
Lishman says having mastered flying the small weight-shift aircraft (steered with a bar in front of the pilot similar to a hang glider) he went out looking for a purpose to his new hobby, and eventually stumbled across the idea of accompanying migratory birds as they fly south.
"The geese were really guinea pigs because we didn't just want to fly birds on a migration route for no purpose," he says, adding that geese weren't endangered and so didn't really need the help. "But I was contacted by a group of ornithologists and biologists who thought there might be some potential in bringing back threatened or endangered species of birds if you could get them to migrate."
Travelling at around 35 miles per hour in the ultralight, Lishman says it's just the right speed to fly with birds.
"A lot of aviators just envy birds," he says. "We've been trying to emulate birds since we could perceive them as humans. So it was a realization of a kind of mass dream."
After achieving some success with the geese, Lishman moved on to a tougher task. Whooping cranes had been in decline for many years. In the 1940s their numbers dwindled to only 16 on the continent.
"For years the whooping crane recovery team, which was a U.S. - Canadian group of government biologists, had been trying to establish a secondary flock... and nothing had worked," he says. "So they were grasping at straws, and my straw seemed pretty far out. But we convinced them after a number of years that it was possible, so we started flying with whooping cranes back in 2001."
It was a tricky process, very different from flying with the geese.
"The geese we could be fairly sloppy with because we weren't trying to save geese," he says. "But the whooping cranes, they had to be maintained wild, you didn't want them to imprint on a human. So we had to develop a whole lot of different techniques, including costumes, using puppets. And essentially using their own species as their role model."
He says it was a lot more work, but it seems to be helping, since there are now around 80 whooping cranes in eastern North America.
"It's not a perfect success yet because we need generation after generation going on their own," he says. "The one's we've led south are all migrating, but in another ten years we'll know. It looks good at the moment."
Lishman says he's since retired from the migration-conducting business, but biologists continue to move along on the work he started. He says the technique could be applicable to a number of other species worldwide, although somebody else is going to have to do that work.
"Its taken its own course now," he says.
The idea behind his latest project came to him during one of his last wild goose missions, when a major hurricane blew through Central America in the mid-1990s.
"All of these people in their communities were needing supplies, and they couldn't get helicopters in and I thought we could use ultralights, because you can package them up and ship them into a location and they're relatively cheap," he says.
Compared to helicopters, or fixed-wing craft, ultralights aren't costly to maintain and can carry up to 100 kilograms of supplies to remote locations. Without landing, says Lishman, the pilot could do a slow fly-past of an isolated spot and make the drop, hours before the nearest emergency crews would arrive.
"Ultralights... were considered flying lawn chairs by general aviation, and they have still a little bit of a bad attitude out there about them. Although now, they're a hundred horsepower, and are built like regular aircraft, all up to aircraft standards,” he says. “They're still a lot cheaper, and with the weight shift method of flying, if you can learn to ride a bicycle you can learn to fly it,".
He's built a prototype, and done about 50 practice drops so far, but he doesn't expect ultralights to be responding to disasters anytime soon since it'll take a while to convince relief agencies that it's worthwhile.
"It took ten years to convince the bird conventions that this may be a workable thing," he said. "What I've learned is disaster relief is really a hodge-podge of bureaucracies. There's no head office you can go to. But I'm sorting my way through it... I go to Europe in November, I have some meetings setup with disaster relief agencies there."
That'll have to wait, since for the time being, Lishman is making good on a promise he made to himself a long time ago, to explore the 30,000 Islands in his kite-like machine.
"I came up here in this area back in the early ’80s," he says. "And a friend took me out to some of these outer islands... and it just so enthralled me with the whole place that I said one day I'm going to come back here with an ultralight on floats and go exploring. It's very difficult of course... with all the rocks. But with an ultralight... they're rubber floats so you can basically hit a rock and not worry too much. It doesn't fly fast and it's a great way to explore."
Seeing the Sound as the goose flies
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