Swans brightened our winter
The frost-fringed gibbous moon, flanked by Mars, the Red Planet, and Venus, the Evening Star, gilded the winter sky above ice-mantled Castle Semple Loch.
Dabbling ducks cackled garrulously among frozen reeds, a grey heron stood stock-still by a stream side.
A sharp-taloned carrion crow squashed the last vestiges of life from a vole caught scurrying across a moonlit glade as darkness dimmed the tree-surrounded loch on a freezing-cold night.
From twilight’s sombre shadows came the eerie echo I waited among the rime-ribboned reeds to hear – the mellow, trumpeting call of the Whooper Swans.
The graceful creatures are here, wintering in Renfrewshire to escape the snowy climates of their Icelandic haunts.
The four, white-winged birds, long necks outstretched, emerged from the blackness like huge, ghostly moths flapping phantom-like, low across the frozen waters of the moonsilvered loch.
Mine of information
Derek Parker knew many of Paisley’s secrets – the grimy and the good.
He wandered every corner in search of the clues that would unlock Renfrewshire’s rich history.
These tales were shared with readers in his hugely popular Parker’s Way column.
We’ve opened our vault to handpick our favourites for you. This article was first published on January 12, 2004.
One of the swans has a chequered history.
I call her Finola after the daughter of Lir, the Irish sea god.
Along with her three doomed brothers, the legendary Finola was turned into a swan by the evil enchantress, Aeife, and condemned to roam the lonely lakes of the British Isles for 900 years.
Finola, the Castle Semple Loch swan, was ringed with a leg tag bearing the initials, VXL.
Ornithologists had marked her at the RSPB reserve at Minsmere, Cheshire, on February 15, 1996, to track her journeys.
Later that year, she was seen at Lough Swilly, on Ireland’s Donegal coast, with further sightings on farmland at Blackstoun Farm, between Paisley and Linwood, between December 7 and 25.
In subsequent years, Finola was seen regularly on the River Black Cart, near Glasgow Airport, as well as the RSPB reserves at Lochwinnoch and Minsmere.
In between times, she and other swans – guided by the stars and Earth’s magnetic forces – migrated to Iceland to breed in summer.
She was seen at Lochwinnoch with two mature cygnets in 2000 and with four fully-grown young in 2002.
In the sorrowful Children of Lir legend, Finola and her brethren are changed back into humans by St Cumhaec.
But, on resuming human form, they become old men and a woman and shrivel up and die.
As her Castle Semple namesake winged her way, trumpeting and bugling into the misty darkness, I hoped she would brighten the winter waters of the loch for many years to come.