Graceful beauty of swans is an unforgettable sight.
A huge snow-white bird gliding placidly over a body of water while hoisting its long white neck to reveal a softly rounded head and handsome beak makes us stop still and whisper “swan.”
I can almost hear the whisper when people write to tell me about seeing a swan.
There’s no misidentifying this bird, even though wild swans are not a normal part of Houston’s birdlife.
They used to be, back in the 1800s, when massive numbers of trumpeter swans flying on 7-foot wingspans and uttering deep-throated bugling calls migrated here and, especially, to Galveston Bay from northern breeding grounds.
Market hunters of the 19th century decimated trumpeter swans to sell skins for women’s powder puffs and feathers for women’s high-fashion hats. Conservation work that began in the 20th century has helped restore the bird’s populations, but not yet in great migratory flocks reaching Texas.
In the winter of 2014, a lone trumpeter swan showed up at Lakeside Park in The Woodlands. So, take no swan for granted.
Once in a while, a tundra swan, aka whistling swan, migrates to Houston for the winter from breeding grounds on the tundra — where else? — of Alaska and Canada’s Northwest Territories.
Although difficult to distinguish from a trumpeter swan, the tundra swan is more likely to show up on a nearby lake. Look at the beak to make sure. A trumpeter swan has a long, straight beak forming a “V” at the forehead, whereas a tundra swan has a sloping beak forming a “U” at the forehead.
Both birds are North America’s only native swans.
Swans that people usually see around Houston are nonnative mute swans, escaped from decorative ponds or aviaries, that live principally on ponds and lakes in suburban neighborhoods, often on golf course ponds. Some of the birds become feral or wild.
Mute swans hail mostly from Europe, where they are among the most common of wild swans and get their name from a reputed silence, even though they utter several
sounds.
The birds are easily identified by the elegant profile of an S-curved neck, with the head pointing the beak downward. The distinctly orange beak has an ornate black knob at the base.
Mute swans drift over the water with wings slightly arched, as though ready to sail on a breeze, a posture imitated by ballerinas in Tchaikovsky’s “Swan Lake.”
It’s a sight that’s hard to miss.