Swanning along the lakes

IHAVE been going to Charvil Country Park at least once a week for over a year now. It is a delightful nature reserve with about a dozen lakes and numerous pathways. The main attraction for me has been a pair of swans that live on one of the lakes. In April last year I saw a nest they had created among the bullrushes. I could see there were many eggs in it.

The next month I spotted seven baby swans by the nest. As they grew bigger, I took to feeding them with fresh seeded bread following a recommendation by a lady from the RSPCA. She told me plain bread for a swan was like fish and chips, tasty, but not so healthy, and that the seeded variety was better.

I watched the cygnets grow up and admired how meticulously their parents cared for them. The mother did not take any of the food on offer, but aggressively shooed away any ducks, geese or other birds that might have wanted to grab a share of the pickings. The father always ate some of the bread, but gave priority to the cygnets.

Swan pairs are very territorial and usually want to have a lake to themselves, unless it is very big, but there were also two other swans on the lake. A fisherman told me that they were part of the brood from the previous year. The mother usually chased away these two away halfway across the lake when they tried to share the seeded bread, but they always came back and she sometimes just resigned herself to their presence. Currently they are nowhere to be seen and no doubt have been banished for good.

The seven cygnets decreased to five, probably due to predators such as mink and foxes. A few months ago, they were almost the size of their parents with just a few brown feathers left amongst the white.

This was when the mother started taking bread from me and pecking at and biting her youngsters to stop them eating it, as indeed did the father swan. The cygnets were clearly taken aback and confused by this behaviour, as indeed was I, and did not take the strong hints to leave.

The mother was no doubt expecting again and needed the food more than her children to prepare for the next brood, as well as wanting her five youngsters to go and find their own way in the world. The five are now gone from the lake too.

Where did they end up? I hope they kept together for safety and solidarity. If you go to Windsor, as I did a few weeks ago, you will see a few hundred swans on the River Thames, most of them youngsters just like them. I wondered whether the five cygnets were there too, but could not see them. The swans get very well fed in Windsor and get on reasonably well with each other, apart from some fighting over food. They are also the property of the Queen, if they have not been marked otherwise, a right dating back centuries. This is also one of the places where Swan Support and other rescue organisations release swans from their sanctuaries once their injuries are healed.

The largest swan community is at the Abbotsbury Swannery on the Dorset coast, which has about 600 swans, 2% of the UK total. The flock was established by Benedictine monks over 900 years ago to provide food for banquets. Their meat is a bit tough apparently and today swans are a protected species.

There are now at least three nests on three lakes in Charvil Country Park, two amongst bullrushes and another on an island. The two swans I follow have just had nine babies. It is a good time to go swan watching.