A tale from the riverbank of a pair of swans, a kingfisher and the killer in the depths
Nature writer spent lockdown watching mute swans mate and build a nest, but are they in danger?
I’ve written a lot about swans. Four books, a TV show, radio programmes and enough articles to account for a substantial tract of woodland. But their allure never lessens.
To this day nothing in all nature tugs at my heartstrings and lumpens my thrapple like the sight and sound of swans in flight, and if they happen to cross my path in a beautiful landscape setting then my delight at what I think of as wild theatre is indulged.
If you were to ask me which beautiful landscape settings, I could cite a few greatest hits.
A pair of mute swans flying towards Ben Ledi at sunset, their plumage reddened and yellowed by the light, and at every wing beat their wings were either lit up or shadowed as they rose and fell, as if being switched off and on to a rhythmic pulse of sublime power.
A single whooper swan flying into a storm cloud high on Skye’s Bla Bheinn, apparently determined to cross the ridge when it seemed so much more logical to fly round; a skein of a dozen Bewick swans alighting on a small loch in Fife, newly arrived from Siberia.
Then there was the family of colossal trumpeter swans in a beaver-rich wetland forest in the valley of the Yukon on the Alaska-Canada border; a family of whooper swans on their nesting grounds in the Lofoten Islands of Arctic Norway on a lake of glacier-green water, and a mute swan cob charging at a fox across a frozen loch under Arthur’s Seat in Edinburgh, the sound of its wing beats echoing back off the ice.
That kind of thing. My nature-writing life is enriched by the tribe of wild swans. And still, every now and then there is something new, something that commands me to stop and watch, and my sense of wonder renews and replenishes and the spell of swans is recast.
It was March and we were staring lockdown in the face and wondering what to make of it, and I had taken my bike out along the quiet roads of the Carse of Stirling, and stopped where an old stone bridge crosses the Forth.
A pair of mute swans were on the water. I knew they had nested nearby last year and I was pleased to see them back on the same territory a couple of miles from where I live. They were 200 yards away when they started to go through the exquisite preliminaries of their mating ritual. I have seen it many times and on many different waters, but what made this different was that as it unfolded it drifted towards me at the gentle speed of the river.
They dipped their heads underwater, first in turn and then perfectly synchronised, then the heads turned left and right on tall necks, then the necks intertwined and I have wondered more than once if the first fashioning of the first Celtic knot was designed by a swan-watcher a few thousand years ago. In terms of sheer wild
beauty, the whole pageant has no equal. The consummation happened – the cob, male, mounted the pen, female, took the proffered nape of her neck and pushed her head underwater twice then lifted it clear and they both rose on the water and gave voice to one of the defining anthems of the season.
The pen swam into the bank and the cob threshed the water, drifting at the speed of the river, and was almost directly beneath the bridge when he turned to face upstream and stood tall on the surface. He opened his wings and flailed them mightily while proclaiming his place on the river in a series of admittedly unmusical shrieks. There never was a mute mute swan!
And that was when I started to think through the possibility of a lockdown writing project. I could combine exercise and the need to work in the only place I can work, which is outside, and do it in isolation.
However, it seemed I had competition. By the first week in April, every newspaper seemed awash with writers and readers turning to nature on their doorstep. Every other email was telling me about deer in the garden, foxes in the car park, sparrowhawks on the bird table, strange droppings in the street, and what birds is it that sounds like this...?
So I went to the river every day and sat, and sat and sat, which is how I go to work a lot of the time.
On the third day, two things happened that quickened my interest. The pen was still building the nest but spent a lot of time feeding in the river in preparation for a five-week incubation.
The riverbank suddenly fired a missile. It shot straight across the river and
vanished into overhanging willows and alders on my side of the river. It blazed in the sunlight and when it hit the trees it dowsed as if it had never been. The swans had kingfishers for neighbours.
Over the next few days I watched the kingfishers come and go across the river. The only place where I can sit and not be disturbed – and not disturb the swan – is about 20 yards from the kingfisher’s crossing point.
All it has to do is turn left instead of right and fly upstream and will pass a few feet from the end of my nose. It never happened, but another, more traumatic event was about to unfold. The pen had been feeding in midstream for about 10 minutes. Then the water beneath her exploded.
She bolted sideways at terrific speed for the shallows by the nest island where she stopped and stared back at where a huge underwater disturbance was thrusting a deep and violent furrow in the surface of the water.
I only had one thought: pike. I don’t fish and I don’t know much about them. I did a little research and learned that they are capable of high-energy outbursts to ambush prey. But prey the size of
They gave voice to a defining anthem of the season
fully grown swan? Then I found a report from Northern Ireland in 2015 in which an eye-witness described how a swan dipped its head in the water exactly as the Forth pen had done, then resurfaced “with a pike clamped round the bird’s head”. The bird’s injuries proved fatal.
The consensus of professional ornithologists was that such attacks do happen but were very, very rare. But was that what just happened in front of my disbelieving eyes?
A week later, something fresh and white appeared on the other side of the river as I cycled.
I put the binoculars on the unmistakable sight of a slender willow newly felled by a beaver.
I hadn’t heard of beavers any nearer to Stirling than Callander, 16 miles away. This one, doubtless encouraged by the absence of human activity, was half a mile in a straight line from Stirling Castle.
More and more as I wander the wild world and keep nature’s company, I think possibly the wisest words I have ever read were uttered by John Muir: “When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe.”