I first spotted this male Mute Swan as I was walking over Lucy’s Mill Bridge, and realised that he was completely beside himself about something, but it took me several minutes to see beyond his fury and unravel the story that lay behind it.
My second photo shows the cob as I first saw him, powering under the road bridge towards town. As soon as he reached the pool in front of the apartments he spotted another adult male, and immediately attacked him – driving him out along the river. Then he came back, found another adult in the pool, and drove that one away up the weir. My main image was taken after this, as he turned and headed back into the pool. It was only then that I scanned the area, and saw that he was heading towards a pen and three well-grown cygnets who were gathered by the wall at the base of the apartments. The pen was pulling at something that was caught in a tangle of dead branches, but failing to move it, and when the cob arrived he joined her effort and pulled at it too. It was only when they gave up and moved away, with the other youngsters following, that I could see they’d been trying to move the dead body of another cygnet.
This is the time of year when adult Mute Swans begin to reject their offspring, driving them away and forcing them to become independent, and every year there are a few sad incidents when cygnets that don’t take the hint and leave are attacked by their fathers, and killed. But this didn’t look like that: both adult swans were clearly distressed about the dead cygnet, and neither of them was making any move against the other three juveniles, which were sticking very close to them. So my feeling was that the dead youngster had either died of disease, or been killed by an outside attack, and the cob’s fury had been directed at every other adult swan in the area because he felt that his family was under threat.
Although it’s a little early in the season for an outbreak, I was concerned that the bird might have died of H5N1 avian flu, but in any case I knew the Council would want the corpse to be moved, so I texted the Swan Warden and gave him basic information about what I’d seen and where, and he called me shortly afterwards to get more details about the location. By this time I was having coffee in BTP, and as it was quite hard for us to understand each other above the ambient noise, I used my phone to screen-grab a couple of images of the dead cygnet from the back of my camera, and sent them to him. This told him all he needed to know, and he texted back that he would retrieve the bird. This evening he called while I was away from my phone, and left a message saying that he’d removed it, and confirming that it had died as the result of being attacked. Knowing Mute Swans as well as he does, and not having seen this morning’s incident, he was inclined to blame the father, but I still think that what I witnessed was a family tragedy, and an enraged cob determined to protect the rest of his brood.
