A pair of trumpeter swans rest at the Riverlands Migratory Bird Sanctuary near St. Louis. (Andy Reago & Chrissy McClarren/CC BY 2.0)
Nearly three decades ago on a chill, still December afternoon, I watched three majestic trumpeter swans touch down in a Chesapeake salt marsh.
It was a sight that had not been seen on the Bay for nearly two centuries, not since this bird — the world’s largest flighted waterfowl — had been hunted out, its feathers prized for ladies’ powder puffs and fancy hats.
(And yes, we do still have a robust migration of tundra swans, smaller cousins of the trumpeters, which visit the Bay annually in November from Alaska.)
That return of the trumpeters was somewhat contrived but immensely hopeful, I wrote at the time. The trumpeters had been raised in captivity and imprinted to follow an ultralight plane some 100 miles from Warrenton, VA, to Maryland’s lower Dorchester County.
The hope was that humans could teach the big birds to “remigrate” to the Chesapeake from remnant populations that still survived in other parts of the U.S. and Canada.
I couldn’t resist comparing their touchdown that afternoon with “the Eagle has landed” news that flashed around the globe in 1969 when humans first reached up and touched the moon.
That was a triumph of computers, engineering, metallurgy and chemical propellants — bursting the very bonds of gravity — an event of explosive force and high technology.
The swanfall of 1997 employed a gossamer-winged ultralight, a flying device resembling drawings by Leonardo da Vinci in the 1400s, weighing less than a dozen swans and designed to fly low and slow. But the event probed a frontier at least as important as outer space: one of recovery and restoration, reconnecting the planet’s old natural circuits that earlier generations had ripped asunder.
The anticipated new migratory route never came to fruition. Fortunately, no one told the trumpeters. Throughout the decades since, little noticed, wild trumpeters from western and northern populations would in some winters appear briefly, just one or a few birds, in parts of the Bay and its watershed.
Trumpeters seem to be explorers in contrast to the tundra swans that are locked into a rigid schedule by their evolutionary strategy of migrating some 9,000 miles a year between Alaskan and Yukon nesting grounds and wintering on the Chesapeake and in North Carolina.
And then in 2021, for reasons known only to themselves, a pair of trumpeters decided to stay — to nest on Hart-Miller Island in the Bay off Baltimore County, a place constructed both as a park and a safe place to put toxic sediments dredged from Baltimore’s shipping channels.
And now we have at least four documented successful trumpeter nests in the Maryland portion of the Chesapeake with several young swans, or cygnets, according to Gabe Foley, coordinator of the Maryland-DC Breeding Bird Atlas.
Two nests are in Anne Arundel County, one near Davidsonville and one on Naval Academy land at Greenbury Point. The pair near Davidsonville (on private property) appeared to have at least three young recently when Bay Journal photographer Dave Harp and I were scouting.
Another pair is nesting on several acres of wetland near a Home Depot in Harford County. Yet another couple appeared for a while near Laurel, MD, on the federal Patuxent Research Refuge, but they have not been seen there for some months, a refuge spokesman said.
No one knows for sure, but the Bay’s newest species of swan appears to have come from an established population in Ontario, Foley said.
What we are gaining is a most impressive creature with wingspans that can exceed 7 feet, standing up to 4 feet tall and weighing as much as 40 pounds (though average weights are more in the 20s and 30s).
And their call! While one might confuse trumpeters for tundra swans on sight, the sonorous, deeply resonant tone of Columbus buccinator (the trumpeter) contrasts sharply with the shriller, wild baying of tundras.
A young trumpeter’s growth would shame the best efforts of Perdue and Tyson with commercial poultry. A young one can go from slightly under half a pound on hatching to 20 pounds in 15 weeks.
So it is time to celebrate this return of the native, to marvel at its presence gracing ponds and rivers of the Bay and its watershed.
However.
I recall the words of a famous science fiction writer who said the best science fiction doesn’t look two centuries into the future and conjure sleek automobiles; rather, it envisions traffic jams and gridlock.
So it occurs to me that the trumpeters have lifestyles a lot like the invasive mute swans that Maryland only recently finished eradicating.
They were eradicated because they did not migrate; they ate our beleaguered submerged grasses all summer long and competed aggressively for nesting space with all manner of native species. And they were multiplying rapidly.
That behavior pretty much describes the trumpeter swan, which can make modest (several hundred mile) migrations if need be, but tends to stay resident. Unlike the situation with the mutes, of Asian origin, it would be a lot harder to justify eradicating a species that flourished throughout most of the Chesapeake’s history.
Fortunately, we are a long way from having to contemplate whether, after leaving an ecosystem for two centuries, you can go home again.
