The white swan might well be the iconic bird of the northern hemisphere. Instantly recognizable, the Whooper Swan would have been among the first birds seen, and eaten, when our species began migrating out of Africa about 200,000 years ago. Certainly there are swans in prehistoric cave art and artifacts, and their remains have been found in middens across Eurasia (Yeomans & Mazzucato 2024).
Figure 1. left, artifact made of felt from ~400 BCE in Siberia; right, the constellation Cygnus
Throughout historical times, the white swan has been a symbol of love, fidelity, longevity, purity, tranquility, and nobility, appearing in countless works of art, literature, song, and theatre for its beauty and symbolism. The ancient Greeks saw a swan in the stars—the constellation Cygnus—and swans featured in many of their legends and myths. Swans also gained spiritual significance in the folklore of cultures across Eurasia from Iceland to China. In the UK, one of King Charles III’s many titles is ‘Seigneur of the Swans’, an honorific held by all British Monarchs since the Middle Ages. There is an interesting relationship between swans and the British nobility but that’s a story for another day.
No wonder, then, that scientists have been interested in swans ever since Aristotle (~350 BCE), who clearly knew that they were monogamous, gregarious, long-lived, and migratory. Indeed, Whooper Swans were among the first birds to yield some of their migratory secrets through ringing in the 1950s and 60s. And because they are among the largest birds, Whooper and Tundra (Bewick’s) Swans were the first birds to be tracked by satellites as they could easily carry the relatively heavy (70 g) transmitters available in the early 1990s (e.g., Kamiya & Ozaki 2002). Even though such transmitters can now be as light as a few grams, long-lasting batteries are still heavy, and swans continue to be at the forefront of migration studies throughout the annual cycle (Liu et al. 2024).
Whilst swans as a group are easily distinguished from all other birds, the four species of white swans in the genus Cygnus are sometimes challenging to tell apart in the field. The remaining two species in that genus, the Black and Black-necked Swans of Australia and southern South America, respectively, have distinctive plumages as their names suggest. The only other bird that is also called a swan, but may actually be a goose, is the Coscoroba Swan (Coscoroba coscoroba) of South America and it, too, is all white.
The similar appearance of the white swans might well be the reason that all their English names (Trumpeter, Whooper, Whistling, and Coscoroba) indicate the sounds they make, or were thought not to make (Mute). Mute Swans do vocalize, if not as loudly as the other swans. The Coscoroba Swan is named onomatopoeically from its call ‘cos-co-roo‘, the Trumpeter and Whooper Swans from their calls, and the Whistling (now Tundra) Swan from the sound made by its wings. Is there another group of birds whose names are so associated with their sounds?
And that’s not all. The genus (and constellation) Cygnus is from the ancient Greek word Kùkvoç pronounced ‘kook-nos‘ and thought by some scholars to mimic the call of the Whooper Swan. Even the English word swan is derived from the German Schwan, which owes its origin to the Proto-Indo-European swenh meaning to sound or to sing.
An ancient Greek proverb claimed that swans sing a particularly beautiful song when they are dying, giving rise to the phrase ‘swan song’, meaning a final act. While that claim about dying swans has generally been debunked, I can imagine that a swan dying from a predator (or hunter) might call to warn its offspring that danger is afoot.
The Trumpeter Swan of North America almost performed its own swan song from 1600 to 1900. They were undoubtedly common before Europeans arrived, with probably more than 100,000 Trumpeter Swans spread across the continent. By 1931, there were as few as 35 (20 adults and 15 cygnets) in the contiguous United States (Banko 1960) and only small populations of breeding birds surviving in Alaska and western Canada, numbering maybe 1000 birds.
Figure 2. Trumpeter Swan range maps: left, before 1600; middle, in the 1930s; right, today.
The main cause of of the Trumpeter Swan’s decline was probably the trade in their skins and feathers for clothing, powder puffs, and purses. Their wing quills were also valued for writing and drawing instruments—the second and third primaries were often thought to be the best for pens as they were very durable, lasting up to 50 times as long as goose quills. Audubon (1843) preferred their quills for the fine details in his artwork as they were “so hard, and yet so elastic, that the best steel-pen of the present day might have blushed, if it could, to be compared with them.”
Between 1823 and 1880, the Hudsons Bay Company marketed about 108,000 Trumpeter Swan skins harvested in northern Canada for shipment to the London markets. As early as 1831, Audubon noted that the Trumpeter “is rarely if ever seen to the eastward mouths of the Mississippi where they were once commonly encountered.”
Figure 3. Trumpeter Swan, by John James Audubon
As a teenage birder in Ontario, Canada, I was familiar with a few captive Mute Swans in our parks and the noisy flocks of Whistling (Tundra) Swans on migration. But the Trumpeter Swan had long ago been extirpated from eastern Canada. In 1966, while working at Kortright Waterfowl Park (a Canadian version of the Wildfowl and Wetlands Trust at Slimbridge in the UK), I met a government biologist, Harry Lumsden, who was passionate about the possibility of re-introducing Trumpeter Swans to Ontario. As we were already raising Tundra Swans from eggs taken from the wild, we talked about raising some Trumpeter Swans in captivity to seed the re-introductions.
Lumsden persevered and in 1982 started working on a recovery program, obtaining 23 eggs from Alberta and distributing the grown cygnets to pond owners in rural Ontario. Thanks to his efforts there are now 2500 Trumpeter Swans breeding in the province and I can find nesting Trumpeter Swans at several sites near my home in Kingston. Now the songs of these swans breeding in my patch evokes Audubon in 1843: “Imagine, reader, that a flock of fifty Swans are thus sporting before you, as they have more than once been in my sight, and you will feel, as I have felt, more happy and void of care than I can describe.”
Further Reading
Aristotle. (~350BCE) The History of Animals. Original Latin translated to English by D’Arcy Wentworth Thompson in 1910. VIEW
Audubon, J.J. (1831) Ornithological biography: or an account of the habits of the birds of the United States of America; accompanied by descriptions of the objects represented in the work entitled The birds of America, and interspersed with delineations of American scenery and manners. Adam & Charles Black, Edinburgh. VIEW
Audubon, J.J. (1843) The birds of America. J.J. Audubon, Philadelphia. VIEW
Banko, W.E. (1960) The Trumpeter Swan: Its history, habits and population in the United States. North American Fauna 63: 1-214. VIEW
Comeau, S. & Vrtiska, M. (2011) Management plan for High Plains Trumpeter Swan Flock.U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, Lacreek National Wildlife Refuge.Martin, SD. VIEW
Kamiya, K. & Ozaki, K. (2002) Satellite tracking of Bewick’s Swan migration from Lake Nakaumi, Japan. Waterbirds: The International Journal of Waterbird Biology 25: 128131. VIEW
Liu, W., Zhang, J., Shimada, T., Liu, Y., Xie, Y., Batbayar, N., Higuchi, H., Damba, I., Cao, L. & Fox, A.D. (2024) Life in the fast and slow lanes: contrasting timing of annual cycle events in high and midlatitude breeding Whooper Swans (Cygnus cygnus). Ibis 166: 1157-1171. VIEW
Yeomans, L. & Mazzucato, C. (2024) Human-bird interactions in the Levant during the Late Pleistocene to Early Holocene: Multi-scalar analysis of avifaunal remains. Archaeological and Anthropological Sciences 16: 185. VIEW
Image credits
Figure 1. Swan artifact from the Hermitage Museum, permissions here; Constellation from Wikimedia Commons, Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license.
Figure 2. Range maps modified from: left, Comeau & Vrtiska (2011); centre and right, Banko (1960); all in the public domain
Figure 3. from Audubon (1843); in the public domain.
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