Feds’ plan to OK hunt of swans assailed
Conservationists seek protection for trumpeters
MINNEAPOLIS — A federal plan to let hunters shoot trumpeter swans has drawn fire from some of the people who toiled to bring the majestic birds back from the brink of extinction.
The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service is working on a plan that would let hunters shoot trumpeter swans, North America’s largest waterfowl species, in several states that allow the hunting of tundra swans, a more numerous species.
Brad Bortner, chief of the service’s migratory bird management division, said the proposal is mostly aimed at protecting tundra swan hunters in five states — Montana, North Dakota, South Dakota, North Carolina and Virginia — who might mistakenly kill trumpeter swans. The soonest the proposal could take effect is the 2019-2020 season.
Tundra swans look almost identical to trumpeter swans, and a hunter who mistakenly shoots a trumpeter is subject to a fine. That rarely happens.
The proposal would let states with low trumpeter numbers hold general swan seasons rather than specific tundra swan seasons.
But that approach doesn’t make sense to the man who personally brought back the eggs from Alaska that seeded Minnesota’s flock in the 1980s.
Speaking for himself, not the state agency, Carrol Henderson, supervisor of the Nongame Wildlife Fund at the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources, said he fears the federal plan puts at risk a population that in Minnesota went from none to more than 20,000 over the past 35 years.
“If a proposal were made to turn it into a game species, I think the agency would suffer a huge black eye,” he said.