With the end of summer approaching (there’s a winter weather advisory in effect for much of Northwest Wyoming right now), it’s time to ready nine of this year’s cygnets for release into Yellowstone National Park. Like the majority of waterfowl, migration is a learned behavior for Trumpeter Swans. Young birds follow their parents to the wintering grounds in the fall and then return to the place where they learned to fly the following spring.

The partnership uses this fact to identify lakes that are suitable for Trumpeter Swans, don’t have breeding pairs on them, and are used by wild swans as staging areas during the fall. We place the young swans before they’ve learned to fly on these lakes or wetland habitats. The young swans interact with the wild birds, learn to fly, and then follow them to their wintering grounds. Many of these wild swans are birds released in previous years that have survived fall migration, wintered outside the Park, and returned to Yellowstone for the summer. With luck, our young birds will return to the area where they were released next spring. After four to five years, the released birds will be mature and, with luck, ready to breed.

In preparation for releasing the cygnets, partnership biologists will be capturing this year’s young later this week. Each cygnet will undergo a health exam, be tested for disease, sexed, and banded with an aluminum U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service band on one leg and a yellow numbered band on the other leg. They will then be ready for release in mid-September. Please come back to this site for weekly updates.

In late July, this family of Trumpeter Swans was found at the Goose Pond wetland complex, east of Fort Washakie on the Wind River Indian Reservation (WRIR). This is the first successful breeding attempt resulting from the partnership’s release program in Fremont County, Wyoming. The female, most likely F37 (her band #), is five years old and was released on the WRIR with four other cygnets in 2013. Her mate is most likely a descendant of birds released along the upper Green River. The pair winters along the Green River in Lincoln County at Seedskadee National Wildlife Refuge in Sweetwater County.

While it is easy to believe that all one needs to do is release swans and hope for the best, this breeding success is the result of actions taken by the Wyoming Wetland Society, private landowners, the Eastern Shoshone and Northern Arapaho tribes, the Natural Resources Conservation Service’s Wetlands Reserve Program (WRP), the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, and the Wyoming Game and Fish Department to restore the Goose Pond wetland complex. The important lesson from this exciting milestone is that if there’s appropriate habitat, Trumpeter Swans will use it — but we have to have both the habitat and the swans for this to occur.

Earlier this afternoon, the swan family at Jackson Fork Ranch was relaxing on the banks of their nesting pond. The four young birds (cygnets) are doing well and should be ready for release into Yellowstone National Park or Oregon later this year.

The primary method that the Swan Project uses for increasing the population of Trumpeter Swans in the Intermountain West is by releasing young swans in appropriate habitat. Each summer, we place paired swans in protected locations so that they can raise a brood of cygnets for the recovery effort. For 2018, it looks like the project will have eleven cygnets that will be ready for release this fall or next spring. Of these birds, nine will be released into Yellowstone National Park and two will go to Oregon.

Currently, the Swan Project has seven breeding pairs that we use for this effort. Over the next few years, we will increase the number of captive pairs to 15. This should allow us to release more than 60 cygnets each year. At that point, our goal of repopulating our region with enough birds to form self-sustaining populations by 2027 should be attainable. Please check back here from time to time to see how we’re doing.