We play games, we humans, and they can needlessly hurt others. One such game is being played out in Maryland, where the state Department of Natural Resources continues to kill, of all things, swans.
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What, a sane person might reasonably ask, warrants the death of swans, thousands of them to date?
It’s all part of the game. You see there are two species of swan native to North America, the widely distributed tundra swan, so named because it nests in tundra region at or above the treeline, and the similar but larger trumpeter swan, named for its powerful voice. The trumpeter was nearly exterminated by colonizing Europeans, well before its full range in pre-Columbian America was known. We do know that trumpeters nested in forest lakes of the mountainous west, and wintered, historically, not only in the west, including the Pacific Coast, but also on the U.S. east coast. There is no proof that they ever nested in the east.
There is a third species, the whooper swan, that is Eurasian, but has shown up on its own in western North America, even breeding in Alaska.
And there is a Eurasian race of the tundra swan, the “Bewick’s” swan, which has also appeared in western North America on its own.
And then there is the mute swan, distinctive by virtue of an orange, not black, beak, with a large knob on the forehead. It is more likely than the other swans to carry its neck in a graceful curve, and breeding birds often fluff their inner wing feathers arched into gracefully rounded forms that resemble sails.
Mute swans are native to Eurasia, for sure, and may have, like the whooper and “Bewick’s” swans, reached America on their own, as wild birds, but they have certainly become well established as a “feral” or “acclimatized” or “non-native” or “exotic” species. Their elegant splendor has, from medieval times, made them popular on estates and in parks and zoos. Not surprisingly they were shipped across the Atlantic to grace ponds and pools of Americans. But they are strong flyers and inevitably escaped captivity many times from the mid to late 19th century onward.
The problem? Well, America has changed enormously from what first Europeans found, being, in ecological terms, quite “Europeanized.” Many of the plants and animals that mute swans have evolved among in Eurasia exist, in similar or identical forms, in America. Many are native, but many are also, like the mute, of Eurasian origins. In other words, the mute swan is very much at home in habitat that is pretty much the same as the habitat is inhabits as a truly native species in Eurasia, from western Europe to eastern Siberia (although, perhaps ironically, as a wild species it has been depleted or eliminated in much of its historical native Eurasian range). Like the horse, there was a prehistoric form of mute swan living in North America, that died out during the great Pleistocene extinctions that saw the loss of so many large, ice-age species of wildlife such as the horse, ground sloth, and woolly mammoth.
Why is there a problem?
It isn’t, except to the game players, also known as wildlife managers, who so love to justify their existence by identifying problems requiring “hunting as a wildlife management tool,” thus justifying their salaries as they depend upon myth to justify their actions. They also depend on the general ignorance of legislators, media, and the public of all things ecological.
The mute swan, no less than other waterfowl, eats vegetation. This is deemed a problem, responsible for degradation of aquatic plants in the Chesapeake Bay.
Huh? No one doubts that the Chesapeake is not the bay it once was, but intense human use by a huge and highly consumptive population has been utterly devastating. Primal conditions will never return and in the hundred-plus years they’ve been there, mute swans have become part of the ecosystem, no more damaging to its waters than they are to the waters of Eurasia, where their “native-ness” is undeniable.
Whatever mute swans do pales in comparison to the degradation of the environment caused by the runoff from industrialized livestock farms, particularly poultry farms, or, for that matter, the bottom-churning impact of countless outboard motor boats plying the bay’s overused waters.
Wildlife management powers-that-be see no hypocrisy in their willing acceptance of ongoing efforts to introduce the similarly-sized trumpeter swan to eastern North America as a breeding species. It, too, pulls up plants, as does, in varying degrees, other waterfowl and wildlife species. It, too, is aggressive in defense of its breeding territory, a charge laid, in dire terminology, against the mute swan. Added to that, its noise is likely to make it far less popular than is the mute swans in the urban areas that now blanket so much of our east coast.
But, the hope (forlorn, I suspect based on what has happened so far) is that the trumpeter swans will somehow emulate ancestral habits and migrate to forest-lake nesting sites. It hasn’t happened yet, but if it ever does occur whatever social problems trumpeters cause will delight wildlife managers as they can then turn to hunting as their beloved, and job-saving, “wildlife management tool” to reduce trumpeter swan numbers. Indeed, even now, as the public donates money to restore trumpeter swan populations in the west, they have been declared legal game in some places, because hunters, shooting tundra swans (yes, in some places they are legal “game” birds) can’t tell the difference between them and trumpeter swans.
Here in Canada we have similar hypocrisy, with wildlife management types quite happy to continually add non-native coho and other salmon (surely among the most destructive of our exotic fauna in terms of their impacts on native fish) while fussing over the negligible impacts of mute swans, although so far they have only indulged in egg-oiling or replacing mute swan eggs with trumpeter swan eggs, not outright killing. In order to reconcile the double-standard, local wildlife managers have come up with the quaint term “heritage species,” to justify their support for such exotic “game” species as the brown trout or the ring-necked pheasant.
It’s all a deadly game, and dangerous not only to such innocent animal scapegoats as the mute swan, but in terms of diverting publicly-funded resources from real environmental problems. They are problems that can’t be resolved by gunfire, but require a degree of understanding and commitment far beyond the simplified approach to conservation too often employed in the name of wildlife “management.”
Blogging off,
Barry