WILD SWANS.
THE flight of birds still gives true auguries, both of storm and sunshine. They alone can almost outstrip the
wind; and if they cannot outily the onward march of frost, they can soon place hundreds of miles between themselves and any region suddenly invaded by intolerable cold. One of the surest indications that the Ice King has enlarged the borders of his dominions, and brought the seas and shores lying south- ward of the Arctic night temporarily under his sway, is the arrival on our coasts of the swans, the birds which Norse legend and fancy identified with the snow-clouds and the realms of everlasting ice. They are reported to have been seen already off the Norfolk coast; and before long, if the cold continues, they will probably be seen on those inland waters which, according to incontestable evidence, these birds are known to have visited at such times century after century. The author of the " Religio Medici" says in his notes on the birds of Norfolk :—" In hard winters elks, a kind of wild swan, are seen in no small numbers if the winter be mild, they come no further southward than Scotland; if very hard, they go lower, and seek more Southern places, which is the cause that sometimes we see them not before Christmas or the hardest time in winter." Mr. -Stevenson, the author of the "Birds of Norfolk," the classic of local ornithology, says that this account written by the learned Norwich physician in the days of Queen Elizabeth agrees most accurately with modern experience of the visits of the wild swan, since, with one exception, he had no trustworthy record of their being killed in the county before December, and then only when there was an early beginning of frost and snow. All the very severe winters are noted as "great swan years" in Norfolk, and the birds then often stay till as late as March. By that time they are scattered in small flocks round the coast and salt marshes. But in the first week in March they gather into " herds " and fly straight northwards, passing right across the county in a straight line for that part of the Arctic Circle in which they intend to nest.
There is something particularly interesting and suggestive both in the appearance and the life of these grave and stately strangers from the hyperborean lands. They are the largest of all the Northern birds, and infinitely the most striking in form and hue. They are among the very few birds of pure white plumage in summer and winter alike. They are abso- lutely harmless, though possessed of great strength and power of flight; and they depend for their existence on the fact that they make their nest and rear their young in lands where no man dwells, or where those relentless enemies of animal life, the savage and the semi-savage, are so rarely found that these great, helpless, ground-nesting birds are in a measure free from their molestation. It is said that the hooper swans once nested in the Orkneys. But at the present time these, the commonest of our wild swan visitors, breed in the furthest North, in Iceland, in Lapland, and on the enormous fringe of tundra which runs along the rim of the Old World from the White Sea eastwards. When the late Mr. Seebohm and Mr. Harvie-Brown were waiting together on the Petchora River to see and mark the arrival of the birds from the South to nest in the Arctic tundras, almost the first birds to come were the wild swans. These would not be the birds from Norfolk, but possibly those which had spent the winter on the Caspian Sea. In the spring each pair flies some thousand miles north, probably to nest on or near the spot where its ancestors reared their cygnets centuries ago. On the Petehora the hooper swans appeared on May 11th. In the valley of the Yenisei, where Mr. Seebohm saw them later, when he accompanied Captain Wiggins on one of his bold adventures through the Kara Sea, the hoopers appeared on May 5th. On the Petchora they arrived in pairs, flying high overhead, and soon settled down in the willow scrub which covered the islands, and there built their great nests of sedge and reared their young. Besides the hooper, we are visited in hard winters by a smaller wild species, which the old naturalist Pallas identified a century ago. It is known as Bewick's swan, and though smaller than the hooper, comes from even more distant lands. Like certain other species, this bird vanishes from all human knowledge in the spring, as if it had become transformed into the snow-clouds with which Northern fancy identified its race. It was found to nest on lands so profoundly remote that the previous uncer- tainty as to its origin was easily accounted for. It breeds in the tundras west of the White Sea, lands absolutely unvisited by ordinary travellers, and inhabited only by scattered Samoyeds, whose interest in natural history is confined to trapping the birds upon their nests and stealing their eggs, or to organising "swan drives" when the unfortunate birds have shea their flight feathers, and are helpless. The numbers of men and of swans and wild geese in these distant Arctic lands vary inversely. Swans and geese, unlike nearly all other birds, shed most of their flight feathers at the same time, and remain unable to fly till the fresh quills have grown. At such times the "native," if unfortunately he happens to be in the neighbourhood, takes the opportunity to kill the birds. The Bevrick's swans, though reared at such a vast distance in the furthest North and East, come in numbers to the shores of Ireland, where the numerous estuaries and bays offer them a safe and congenial winter home. It is among the curiosities of natural history that while these two birds fly north to nest in such high latitudes, the mute swans, the originals of our domesticated birds, nest at least a thousand miles further south. They do not breed west of the Rhine, or further north than Denmark and the South of Sweden. The flight of these, which are probably the largest of all swans, is a most beautiful sight. The birds fly in ordered ranks, if in any number, and each stroke of the wings makes a clear and musical sound. The stretch of the pinions is often as much as eight, and a half feet across, and though it is not apparently fast, the progress of the bird is very rapid. A flight of swans out over the bay is a sight not to be forgotten. Their great size and snowy plumage keep them in sight longer than any other birds could possibly be visible to the eye. It looks like the beginning of a journey into infinity, and Tennyson's description of a rook built palace that— "Lent broad view to distant lands, Far as the wild swan wings, to where the sky Dips down to sea and sands," is admirably appropriate.
Whence the legend of the swan song came is not very certain. It was one of the tales of the ancients ; but, unlike most other fables about animals, was very early questioned. Even Pliny, in his great reservoir of nonsense about animals, doubted it ; and so did Athenaeus and others. Sir Thomas Browne noted it among his "vulgar errors." But the call of the hooper swan as it flies is very striking, and when uttered by night may well have given rise to the story.
The mute swan now seen, either tame or half wild, all over England is believed to have been first brought from Cyprus by Richard Cceur-de-Lion. Consequently, as the visits of the wild Arctic swans were mainly confined to the coast, there was little material for the growth of idealisation such as the beauty, dignity, and whiteness of the birds suggest. The early swan legends are all of Northern origin. Norse story made them the sacred birds of the goddess Freyr, and identified them with the form and colour of her chariot in the clouds. The whiteness and purity of the bird's colour naturally gave rise to the myth of the swan maidens, too good for any one in this world, and able at will to transform their shape and take wing to the virginal snows. Lohengrin's mysterious arrival and departure in the boat drawn by a swan may naturally be traced to the riddle of the silent and sudden coming and going of the migrating swans, "coming no man knoweth whence, and going no man knoweth whither." In the legend of Hellas all the other six brothers and sisters were changed into swans—in other words, were given the power of safety and flight at will—while the known confidence of the birds in man
(in the South, where they were early half-domesticated), typified their willingness to return to human shape.
It is perhaps not generally known that Edward L of England took the swan for his badge or totem. When his son the Prince of Wales was knighted, and then conferred the Order on three hundred of his companions of noble birth, two swans are said to have been brought into the hall "gorgeously caparisoned, and with their beaks gilded, a most pleasing sight to all beholders," and upon these swans the King swore before all his Court to avenge the death of Comyn, whom Robert Bruce had stabbed in the church where he had appointed a meeting to settle their claims to the Scotch throne.
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