While out walking my dog one clear, December night I heard a loud trumpeting sound. It was just after Christmas so I figured a child had a new horn and was practicing to be another Louis “satchmo” Armstrong. Either that or the angel Gabriel was looking for me.
The cacophonous sound came first from the north, then from the west and then, splash, splash! I knew at once that it was migrating Trumpeter swans. To my untrained ear, the sound more closely resembled French horns-but whoever heard of French Horn swans?
Nevertheless, they landed on Greenook Lade and continued their raucous song well into the night. Upon looking out the next morning I saw a trio of large Cygnus buccinators (Trumpeter swans) bobbing and bowing before the two Mute swans left over from Pen and Cob’s spring nesting. They all looked serene and amiable until I tossed some bread on the water, at which time, the hostiles became hostile. One grabbed a cygnet by the tail and just about drowned him; the others set about gobbling bread and kept the second cygnet from eating.
It is common for migrating Whistling swans to pass over Michigan on their way from the Arctic to the Chesapeake Bay, but for Trumpeter swans, who were just about extinct and, who had not been seen east of the Rockies since the mid l800’s, when the pressures from hunting drove them west, to be seen in Michigan is quite a rarity.
Then why are they here?
In the l980’s, I read in the Ann Arbor News that the DNR was bringing some Trumpeter eggs from the northwest, maybe Yellowstone or Red Rock Lakes Refuge in Montana, to be placed in Mute swan nests around Traverse City where large numbers of Mutes congregate on the Bordman River in wintertime. The Mute swan is a weak migrator and it was hoped that mixing the very strong migrating swans would re-instill some migratory instinct.
I love the Mute swan for its easy domestication and friendliness. I hope that the wilder, more aggressive Trumpeter is not beginning to push it out of these parts-even though the Mute is a native of Eurasia and was itself only introduced here in the l920’s. Loch Alpine and Cygnus Olor have been friends for 47 years.