The Season Of Swans

It’s a voracious eater, capable of digesting more than 20 pounds of food per day.

Dancers and ice skaters have tried to mimic its graceful movements. In flight, with an 8-foot wingspan, it has earned a spot in myth and legend.

Despite its beauty and popularity, it was almost hunted to extinction by the 1930s.

No gun sights trained on it today, but the trumpeter swan faces a new danger. Urbanization is encroaching on its turf, closing in on the farms that have replaced the wetlands as its primary feeding grounds.

In Skagit County, 50 miles north of Seattle and home to one of the largest flocks of migratory trumpeter swans in North America, a group of enthusiasts gathered recently to discuss the future of the bird and how best to help it into the 21st century.

While the rest of North America is home to about 4,000 trumpeter swans, more than 15,000 live west of the Cascade Mountains. Of those, up to 1,500 live on food grown on the farms along the Skagit Valley from October through late February. And about 1,000 of the similar but smaller tundra swans also winter in the valley.

That’s quite a change from 1932, when biologists estimated there were only 55 breeding pairs of trumpeters left in the contiguous United States.

Before the mid-1800s, trumpeter swans were thought to be numerous throughout North America. But settlers hunted them without restrictions for their meat and feathers. In the 1930s, they became a protected species, and their numbers slowly increased.

“I have yet to meet someone who didn’t like a trumpeter swan. It is hard to hate a swan,” said Martha Jordan of Mill Creek, Wash., a swan advocate.

“The trumpeter swan has traditionally fed on aquatic vegetation, on the bottom of marshes and wetlands. But when those resources are depleted, the birds have been forced to modify their feeding,” said Dave Weaver, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service biologist.

The swans have found easy pickings in the Skagit Valley, where farmland is ample and farmers, for the most part, don’t see them as a threat, perhaps because the birds don’t overstay their welcome.

Unlike the Canada goose, the trumpeter swan is a true migratory bird, flying back to Alaska to reproduce in the summer.

Swans don’t stay in one spot for very long. They may be at one farm one day and several miles away the next, Jordan said.

But urbanization is gradually reducing the area the swans can live on.

There’s more at stake here than the survival of a species.

The birds have a hold on people, something intangible that seems to put them above other threatened species.

For Weaver, the magic is in the flight. To see one of the world’s largest flying birds - an adult male averages about 26 pounds and an 8-foot wingspan - is a treat.

“It is a magnificent bird. Just to see it here, in its wintering habitat, it is intriguing and rewarding,” he said.