Qualla: Swan Lake Nature Sanctuary

Swan Lake Nature Sanctuary: Introduction

Thu, 17 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit CC BY-SA 2.5. Every autumn for nearly twenty years, Swan Lake turned over and the neighbourhood held its breath. Summer heat had stratified the water into layers; the bottom layer, starved of oxygen by the sheer volume of rotting algae above it, filled with methane and hydrogen sulphide. When the cooling surface water finally sank and the lake mixed, all of that came up at once. Saanich residents called the place a cesspool and avoided it. Fish had been dying here since at least 1952. That this same lake is now a nature sanctuary drawing more than twenty thousand people a year into its education programs is not a story about a landscape that was always beautiful. It is a story about one that was fixed.

Image: CC BY-SA 2.5

Swan Lake Nature Sanctuary: Nets Between Two Poles

Thu, 17 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Brian Burger from Victoria, Canada, CC BY 2.0. Long before any of that, Swan Lake was a hunting and gathering ground for the Songhees people, and the archaeological record bears it out — arrowheads and spear tips have turned up repeatedly in the fields and hillsides around the water. More than a hundred plant species were kno...

Image: Brian Burger from Victoria, Canada | CC BY 2.0

Swan Lake Nature Sanctuary: A Lake and a Hill

Thu, 17 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Brian Burger from Victoria, Canada, CC BY 2.0. The sanctuary is really two places that have agreed to be one. At the bottom is Swan Lake itself — 9.4 hectares of open water, ringed by 43.4 hectares of marshy lowland, a body of water that swells to cover 32.4 hectares of that low ground when it floods in winter. Above it stand...

Image: Brian Burger from Victoria, Canada | CC BY 2.0

Swan Lake Nature Sanctuary: What Went Into the Water

Thu, 17 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Brian Burger from Victoria, Canada, CC BY 2.0. The poisoning of Swan Lake was thoroughly ordinary. Three streams of nutrients fed the inflow as the city grew around it: fertilizer runoff from farms in the Blenkinsop Valley and around the lake, effluent from a sewage treatment plant at Quadra and McKenzie serving almost five h...

Image: Brian Burger from Victoria, Canada | CC BY 2.0

Swan Lake Nature Sanctuary: Incorporated, 16 June 1975

Thu, 17 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Brian Burger from Victoria, Canada, CC BY 2.0. Saanich began quietly buying land around the lake and hill in the early 1960s with the intention of keeping it undeveloped, spending roughly $650,000 between 1965 and 1978. The Swan Lake Christmas Hill Nature Sanctuary Society was incorporated on 16 June 1975 to run the place, an...

Image: Brian Burger from Victoria, Canada | CC BY 2.0