Winter visiting swans are set to depart very soon
As we leave winter behind, the evocative, loud, bugling calls of Whooper Swans will soon fall silent for another year as these impressive winter visitors to Ireland depart northwards for their breeding grounds in remote areas of the Icelandic tundra.
We have three species of swan in Ireland. The Mute Swan with its orange-red bill and prominent black knob on its forehead, is a well-known and widely distributed resident. The other two have yellow bills, do not have black knobs on their foreheads, and are winter visitors from the far north.
The Whooper Swan, the larger of the two winter visitors, is immortalised in the legend of the Children of Lir in which the children’s wicked step-mother turned the four offspring of King Lir into swans.
The Whooper Swan is larger and the yellow on its bill extends below its nostrils as shown above. Bewick’s Swan is smaller, more goose-like, and the yellow colour on its bill stops short of its nostrils. It nests in Arctic Russia.
The results of the 8th International Swan Census that took place in January 2020 have just been released and they show that while Whooper Swan numbers increased by 27% since 2015, Bewick’s Swan numbers continued to tumble, so much so that the species looks set to be extinct in Ireland in the coming years.
The census is carried out over a single weekend every five years. Nearly 300 volunteer birdwatchers, as well as staff from BirdWatch Ireland and the National Parks and Wildlife Service, take part in the census, checking over 1,500 locations across the island of Ireland.
In 2020, 19,111 Whooper Swans were recorded, 14,467 in the Republic of Ireland and 4,644 in Northern Ireland, the highest total ever recorded on the island. In total, 550 flocks were recorded. Wetlands along the River Shannon and its lakes and tributaries form a stronghold for the species. The largest numbers of birds were recorded in counties Offaly, Galway, Roscommon, Donegal, Derry and Antrim.
Only 12 Bewick’s Swans were recorded in all of Ireland during the 2020 census – 11 in Co Wexford and a lone bird in Co Roscommon. It is expected that the species will cease to occur in Ireland altogether in the near future due to changes in its migration as a result of climate change.