Seeing our rogue swans take flight is bittersweet for this caged bird

The cygnets have finally gone. They took their sweet time. Just after Christmas, I cycled along the Grand Canal and saw whole flocks of new arrivals; their distinctive whitening grey plumage distinguishing them from the more established, all white residents. I like to think of the older swans on the canal as being like students in their final year of college: they know the real world beckons but they’re determined to have one final fling before they have to concern themselves with settling down, choosing a new home and building a house. Into their midst, the freshers arrive, all grey hair and inexperience, up for whatever. Much as I adore the little fuzz balls that hatch each Spring, if I could be a swan for a year, I’d choose a canal year with all the excitement of the matching before the dispatching and hatching. Swan Coppers, one of the Tymon keepers calls it. Sure why wouldn’t you want to be there?

Mind you, I’d have a slim enough chance of making it. In spite of the occasionally terrifying robustness of adult swans, less than 50% of their offspring ever get as far as the canal. We had four cygnets on the lake at our end of the park last year and only one has made it to take-off. Heartbreakingly, two disappeared on the same night when they were big enough to seem inedible; the sated looking heron the only clue to their fate. A third disappeared a few months ago, leaving only one surviving child who, somewhat understandably, is still with his parents.

But the youngsters on the other lake all cleared off in the last week. Readers may remember how this family of undesirables invaded Tymon last September, defeating our long-time resident swans in a royal rumble that resulted in our lot having to be relocated to another pond, and me having to carry a fully-grown young swan under my oxter (much lighter than you’d imagine, is the answer to the question I’m most frequently asked about that extraordinary episode) and put it in the boot of a car. Obviously, the grudge I held against the family of interlopers as a result was both human and huge – neither of which was appropriate given that everyone involved had simply followed the rules of nature – but eventually, I accepted that these were our swans now and photographed them accordingly (though I never fed them; deep down, there’s a part of me that still thinks they can f*** right off.)

But I was quite interested when six became five, especially as I’d seen Number Six on his own on the playing fields, either preparing for take-off or for his own demise. I don’t know if he was bullied out by his war-mongering Dad — male swans take exception to the presence of other adult white birds in their territory (their mates are the honorable exception, presumably because they provide the ride) — which is why most of these juveniles leave home in the first place. And maybe Number Six did make it to the canal to prepare the way ahead of his siblings. Either way, the rest of the gang duly took off last week without any obvious pecks in the posterior from Dear Old Dad. As far as I can tell, they all left together — at least, they were all there one day and gone the next — and allowing for accidents with overhead wires, the chances are that two or three will have survived that perilous migration.

And in spite of those odds, I envy them their odyssey. For starters, the canal is just outside our 5K, so even as they skidded in to land, they were already James Deanstyle outlaws. And maybe that’s why so many of us have lately become so engaged with the birds: they know nothing of restrictions or viruses or anything much beyond the baffling fact that for the last 10 months, they’ve hardly had to forage for food because loads of terrified humans are throwing birdseed at them. So even as microbiology appears to be trying to upend us, the world turns and slightly larger biology carries on as usual. The goldfinches in my Japanese elm might have come anyway if I hadn’t put out Nyger seeds, but I probably wouldn’t have noticed them. And I certainly wouldn’t have joined the bird identification Facebook group, which, aside from people occasionally threatening to shoot each other — this is the internet after all — is as oddly therapeutic as reading travel brochures in the 1980s when you couldn’t afford to go anywhere.

So Godspeed to the Rogue Swans of Tymon Park: chained by Covid, free as a bird never sounded so good.