Swans rule at Pond Cottage

They shall not pass…

The picture is not very clear but you get the idea. These swans have no intention of letting anyone get past. When I stand up the adults stand up, when I move  forward so do they, hissing and opening their wings to make sure I get the message. It takes a man in a hard hat (oh, why didn’t I get a blurry video of that!) brandishing a white plastic chair, like a lion tamer in a circus ring designed by B&Q, to clear a path to our new vegetable patch.  Swans have last laugh with a march round the garden leaving a trail of surprisingly black poo.

It’s the swan walk that intrigues us. Most days the parents take their brood round the garden, walking in a line to the bird table then round the house pausing to rest every now and then when the smallest cygnet stages a sit down protest.  We have watched them do it almost every year since the first pair of swans appeared on the pond in 2003.  That  year they started out with five cygnets.  By the end of an afternoon’s marching there were only three. Which gave us dark thoughts that this was nature’s way of removing weaklings.

This year for the first time the whole brood of seven cygnets has survived.  As if to celebrate, Ma and Pa are rapidly expanding their territory. A couple of weeks ago a farmer a couple of miles down the road rang to say ‘our’ swans were marching the wee ones past her house, should she call the RSPB?  Ray reassured her they knew what they were doing and sure enough a couple of days later they were back on the pond.

I have never found a bird book that describes this peculiar behaviour let alone explains why they do it.  But just now a precautionary Google reveals that a pair of swans with seven cygnets have become celebraties in Eastbourne for marching their young round a housing estate.

“They have walked up and round to the car park at Langney Shopping Centre, they have walked round the circumference of the local junior school and even walked along sections of the busy Sevenoaks road. ” Wild Life Extra.

According to the local Wild Life Rescue and Ambulance Service (WRAS) this is unusual behaviour.  Does anyone out there know what it is about?

If past performance is anything to go by our swans will soon be off downstream to Loch Leven before they start to moult. Usually, showing great good sense, they hang around until the weekend after T in the Park.  Then we get the pond and the garden back to ourselves and it all seems very empty. But this year we won’t miss the piles of black poo.