My Swangate drama took unexpected turns with the arrival of interlopers

Swangate Update: it turned out t hat my swan was female, which meant, of course, that her name couldn’t be Swanky because everyone knows that’s a boy’s name. Besides, the park keepers had already named her Agnes long before she became my weird best friend.

A quick recap, for those who missed last week’s column. Missing my dog, I had started hand feeding a feral adult swan which had been rejected by his family, back in those more innocent times before I learnt how to tell a swan’s gender. Her parents went on to have eight new cygnets this year, forcing Agnes into exile on the lesser of the two lakes at the end of Tymon Park. She had become a sort of local celebrity — our very own Fungi — and although the situation with her estranged parents was an uneasy one, I was already considering the tourist potential.

But a few days ago, out of the skies — and in a twist worthy of the Sunday night TV drama I am hoping to create from this extraordinary time — a new threat arrived. A fully-f ledged family of seven swans swooped in from God know where, and immediately determined to get their flippers under the watery table of Tymon Park. On Monday morning, when I went to feed the Swan Formerly Known As Swanky, I saw her waddling over — full of optimism and good manners — to say hello to the newcomers. Within moments, the male had her neck in his beak, pressing it to the ground and dragging her towards the water. We watched in horror, the gathering group of Park Familiars and I, muttering wisely about nature taking its course, until we realised this interloper was about to kill our swan. My history of unarmed combat with swans is somewhat ignominious, so a Familiar set about the male’s neck with his umbrella, while I ran at them, waving my arms and — for the second time in my life — screaming obscenities at a swan. Eventually, the umbrella did the trick (though it will never recover), the interloper released his grip and Agnes staggered off to hide in the r ushes. The new family — or the Bastards, as I like to call them — then moved onto her pond, and in the days that followed, when Agnes did appear from her rushes, it was only briefly and she seemed very sad. And it got worse. On Thursday night, the Bastards launched an attack on Agnes’s estranged family. Their Big Daddy beat our Big Daddy in a straight fight and so, after two years on the lake, our swans abandoned their home for Agnes’s now empty lake. When I ar rived on Friday morning, the Irish Wildlife people were there just ahead of me.

There was a lot of plotting, planning and proposing, as the keepers, the bird people and the Familiars all pooled their information. Agnes and her injured father were both located and examined. And I left the park, thinking the Bastard Family would be shipped to the canal and that would be the end of that.

But the Bastards won, you see. And humans — especially ones who actually know about swans — can only interfere with nature so far. The following morning, I arrived as the rescue was being planned and to my great sadness, learnt from the Bird People that it was our swans — all ten of them — that would have to be moved out.

They asked if I could help, and so I and a handful of amateur Familiars all caught a fully-grown cygnet each, securing them as instructed, and carrying them under our arms to the car that would take them away. It was only later that it occurred to me that I could have lightened the mood by pretending to play the swan bagpipes with mine, but in the moment, I was too moved at how docile my majestic charge became as we packed them into the boot to be taken away from us.

We got six and their mother, with the Bird People promising to return to take the bereft male and the two remaining siblings over the coming days.

As for poor Agnes, ‘we’ll have to take her too,’ said the Bird Woman in Chief, though she will be rehomed somewhere else, away from her estranged family.

So what have I learnt from Swangate? That swans make for challenging companions. That nature doesn’t do sentimental happy endings. That park rangers and people who work for wildlife are amazing. And that I now have a swan-shaped hole where the dog-shaped hole used to be. I can’t even imagine what the creature who can fill that might look like.