Tundra swans are wild and beautiful winter visitors
Spotting elegant tundra swans can brighten cold wintry days. Between mid-November and mid-December, we cherish hearing their soft mellow vocalization “hoo-hoo” calls before we see the swans overhead in formation.
They are excitedly communicating, readying for touch down after long flights from their summer breeding territories on the North Slope of Alaska, or from the northernmost tier of Canada to Baffin Island and along Hudson Bay.
The cobs (males) of these large birds are bigger than pens (females) but cannot be told apart visually. The cobs are 4.5 feet in length, with wingspans averaging 6 feet. Their huge wings carry their 16 pounds as many as 3,800 miles over an average of 75 days in migration to reach their predominant wintering habitat in coastal areas from Maryland to North Carolina.
Pennsylvania, Delaware and New Jersey also host small winter populations. Tundra swans are native to North America and are our longest-distance migrating waterfowl.
In 1805, Meriwether Lewis of the Lewis and Clark Expedition coined the name whistling swan which was officially used for the tundra swan until 1983. He noted their soft whistling sound while along the Columbia River giving rise to the species’ biological name, Cygnus columbianus.
The tundra/whistling swans we see are of the Eastern population. A distinct Western population breeds farther south, exclusively in Alaska. These western birds migrate mostly to California (80%) and to Utah, Oregon and Washington.
The Chesapeake’s once-abundant submerged aquatic vegetation attracted the greatest number of Eastern tundra swans to feast on their favorite food. In the 1970s, there were 60,000 or 65% of the species wintering in Bay Country. With the decline of bay grasses, about 72% of the swans now winter along the northeast coast of North Carolina, sometimes numbering 75,000.
The 2024 Maryland midwinter waterfowl survey found 9,600 tundra swans in our state, down from 17,300 in 2013 despite their overall numbers increasing. Last weekend, leading an Annapolis Neck waterfowl trip, we spotted 88 swans on the South River.
Neck bands on two swans I sighted in past years documented that they had flown 3,338 miles from breeding grounds on the far North Slope of Alaska, west of Prudhoe Bay.
The energetics of these large birds flapping such long distances are incredibly demanding, requiring stops to refuel and rest at multiple spots as they spend five months in migration and threeand-a-half months each on wintering and breeding grounds. Swans average 33 mph in migration, reaching 56 mph with a tail wind, flying several hundred miles a day.
Favored stops include Canadian river deltas, Prairie Potholes and the Great Lakes. Their preferred food is aquatic plants — widgeon grass, eelgrass, pondweeds and wild celery. The swans, including Chesapeake ones, also eat waste corn and soybeans, winter wheat and rye shoots on farms and also feed on clams, including the small rangia.
Tundra swans are monogamous, mating for life. Family bonds are strong. Large groups migrate in flocks of 100, departing by mid-March, and returning to the same breeding and wintering areas. Should one partner die, the survivor might not mate for years or ever. They are long-living birds, the oldest making it to nearly 24 years.
May is nesting time in the north with the cobs and pens constructing nests on tundra out of mosses, grasses, and sedges. A pen averages four eggs that she incubates for 38 days. The cob might nest sit while she feeds. Both guard the cygnets from predators until they are ready to fly in two months.
About 3,500 are shot in legal hunts, mostly in North Carolina and a few in Virginia and Delaware. Conservationists are now fighting a bill allowing the hunting of Maryland tundra swans triggered by farmers and hunters.
There are seven swan species globally, and the only other native North American bird is the trumpeter swan. Mute swans are an invasive, non-native species wreaking havoc on native swans and other bird species and destroying bay grasses. The state has all but eradicated mute swans in Maryland.
The story of the wholesale slaughter of tundra and trumpeter swans since colonization is shameful. By 1900, the trumpeter faced extinction; by 1933, fewer than 70 were known to remain in the wild. Tundra swans also suffered a similar fate, but their numbers never plunged as low.
Destruction started early by hunting for their meat and agricultural clearing and wetland loss/degradation. In the 1700s, the swan slaughter accelerated as killing for meat expanded to killing for commercial export to England.
They were valued for their skins that were turned into powder puffs and clothing articles for European women and for their feathers, cherished for hats, down stuffed pillows and for quill pens. Before modern writing instruments, hollow swan feathers became the gold standard for the best writing pens and the female’s five lead feathers on her left wing were the most treasured.
Audubon preferred swan quills for drawing fine detail, noting they were “so hard, and yet so elastic, that the best steel pen of the present day might have blushed, if it could, to be compared with them.”
Trumpeters were largely exterminated along the eastern seaboard by the 1830s, including in Maryland. Populations in the rest of the continent dropped quickly. The Hudson Bay Company traded throughout the 1800s in trumpeter and tundra skins and feathers obtained in the swan’s breeding range. More than 100,000 swans were killed.
The extermination ended in 1918 when the federal Migratory Bird
Treaty Act was enacted, protecting swans. This law, the subsequent acquisition of land for waterfowl refuges, and the eventual protection of wetlands, saved the trumpeter, and likely the tundra swan, from extinction.
The 2023 federal waterfowl census found 138,000 eastern tundra swans, a 44% increase from 2022. The western population declined by 28% to 73,000. For eastern tundra swans, the long-range trend is good as in 1983, the threeyear average goal of 80,000 was first exceeded and has exceeded the goal each year since.
There are now 60,000 trumpeter swans, a remarkable success story for this once critically endangered bird. Maryland now has a few breeding pairs, including a pair near Annapolis we have seen. Threats to both species remain including poisoning by ingestion of spent lead shot and lead fishing sinkers killing thousands of swans and powerline and fence collisions injure and kill swans.
The loss/degradation of wetlands and diminished aquatic vegetation and stormwater pollution from farms and development negatively affect swans, as does climate change eliminating Alaskan nesting and breeding habitat as interior wetlands dry up and permafrost disappears. Illegal shooting still occurs.
Swans hold a timeless allure inspiring the human imagination for centuries. These graceful birds have become potent symbols in various cultures and mythologies around the world. We must do all we can to protect these beautiful and inspiring birds.