This week’s Bird of the Week, compliments of the Weminuche Audubon Society and Audubon Rockies, is the trumpeter swan.
The swan has returned to Pinon Lake, arriving back in late February before the ice had melted but confident that it soon would. Weighing over 25 pounds, trumpeter swans are the heaviest flying birds in the world and can live from 20 to 30 years in the wild.
We are accustomed to seeing this beautiful bird swimming on one of our local lakes during most of the year, but visitors often do a double-take on spotting this out-of-place, lone bird here. Most trumpeters breed in wetlands in remote areas of Alaska, Canada and the northwestern United States and winter on ice-free coastal and inland waters. Our area is out of their normal range.
In the late 1990s, the then-owners of the Pagosa Lodge purchased a pair of trumpeter swans in the belief that they would control the growing population of Canada geese. The original pair were pinioned and unable to fly and for years bred and raised cygnets on Pinon Lake. Nine years ago two were hit by a car while crossing U.S. 160, leaving behind the one we see today. Sheldon or Shellie, no-one knows for sure the sex of our swan.
Trumpeter swans are mainly vegetarian, eating a wide range of aquatic plants by skimming vegetation from the surface, dipping their long necks under water, or tipping upside down like a dabbler. In shallow water, they pump their large, webbed feet to free roots from the mud. In winter they can switch to a more terrestrial diet, eating plants, berries and grain crops.
The feathers of trumpeters are white, but their heads can have rusty stains. They are difficult to distinguish from the smaller tundra swan and differences in bills, head shapes and calls must all be considered to tell the two apart. The trumpeter’s call has been compared to the sound of a French horn.
Trumpeter swans are birds of habit, returning to the same nesting and wintering areas year after year. Although it is likely that “our” swan stops over in the Navajo Lake area before returning to its home on Pinon Lake, the question of where it spends the winter remains unanswered.
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