BILLINGS, Mont. (AP) — Yellowstone National Park may be well-known for its role in rebuilding populations of large mammals like grizzly bears, wolves and bison, yet trumpeter swans have a similar story of dogged recovery that is not as well known.
Since our previous post the snow at the rearing pond has melted away. The captive pair of Trumpeter Swans have been placed on the pond and the female is now incubating her nest, with the male in attendance. All is peaceful now, but a week ago things were much more unsettled. A pair of wild Trumpeter Swans that visited in late April kept returning to the pond and looked like they wanted to nest nearby. The presence of the captive birds may have convinced them that this pond is a good place to raise young.
Swans are very territorial and aggressive towards other pairs during the breeding season. Our captive swans are flightless and can’t hold their own against the wild birds. Because the wild swans were capable of injuring our birds, we had to take measures to protect them. The inch-wide tape that we’ve drawn across the pond was the solution. These lines are visible from the air and keep swans and geese from landing here. We’re keeping our fingers crossed that there will be no more excitement for the remainder of the breeding season.
Photo: Charles Southwick
As the days grow longer, snow and ice begin to melt and Trumpeter Swans head from their wintering grounds to their breeding sites. Young pairs, usually three to four years old, spend their first year together scouting for unoccupied habitat where they can breed in future years. This is the most likely explanation for the pair of Trumpeter Swans that dropped in on Little Jackson Hole earlier this month.
They decided to check out our rearing pond, where we place a pair of swans each year as part of our captive breeding program. While this property is probably too busy for wild birds, it’s a testament to the success of the Swan Partnership’s approach to Trumpeter Swan conservation. This pair is most likely the result of the Wyoming Wetlands Society’s Upper Green River restoration project. As this population has grown, birds are expanding out beyond the Green River and into the Hoback River Basin.
We are looking to duplicate our Wyoming success in Idaho and Montana. The next few years will be very interesting.
Each year, the Greater Yellowstone Trumpeter Swan Working Group meets to discuss the status of Trumpeter Swans in the tristate area (Idaho, Montana, and Wyoming). This year’s meeting took place in West Yellowstone, MT on 12–13 March.
Among the good news was that 1,043 swans were counted in fall of 2018. This is the highest total recorded since birds began to be counted in 1931. Much of the recent increase is due to restoration efforts in Montana that used birds provided by the Wyoming Wetland Society. However, the essential coordination of this work has been conducted by the Pacific Flyway Council and U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, in cooperation with state wildlife agencies and private organizations.
The Swan Partnership is poised to increase the number of swans that we will be producing in the next few years. Our hope is that we can do our part to continue this positive population trend and work with state and federal agencies to restore the resident Rocky Mountain Trumpeter Swan population.
On Monday September 10th, the partnership released eight Trumpeter Swan cygnets into Yellowstone National Park. Four birds were released at Elk Antler Creek on The Yellowstone River and four were released at Seven-Mile Bridge on the Madison River, halfway between West Yellowstone and Madison Junction. All the birds were banded with a yellow and black numbered band on one tarsus (leg) and a Federal metal band on the other tarsus.
The eight birds released this year marked the seventh year that the WWS-RCF Partnership and Yellowstone National Park have collaborated in the Trumpeter Swan restoration effort. Since 2011, we have released 39 swans. Because it takes at least four to five years for swans to mature and form stable pair bonds, we are only now beginning to see results from this long-term effort. Of the birds released, at least 20 of them have survived and several are now paired.
Our hope is that beginning next year the number of breeding Trumpeter Swans within Yellowstone National Park will begin increasing. We will end the restoration work once Yellowstone National Park reaches its population goals.
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.
These cygnets are less than two weeks old and weigh no more than two pounds. Within the next three months they will have grown a full set of feathers and weigh more than 20 pounds. The energy required to fuel such growth is huge. Not only do the young need lots of calories, they require significant amounts of protein to build their muscles and feathers.
While the adults don’t feed their young, they do make it easier for them to find the nutrition they require. The plume of mud you see in front of the middle cygnet has been produced by its parent, in the background. The small waves coming off the adult are due to her paddling her large webbed feet back and forth, stirring up the bottom sediments and bringing vegetation and protein-rich invertebrates to the surface. The cygnet on the left is eating some aquatic vegetation that was stirred up off the bottom and came to the surface. The parents will continue helping their young in this way until they’ve grown large enough to use their long necks to reach the bottom on their own.
Trumpeter Swans are very devoted parents. They spend almost all of their time tending to their brood, finding good feeding spots and making sure that any potential predator keeps its distance. The local Uinta ground squirrels have learned that an attacking swan means business. They’re also very observant and keep track of their surroundings. One example is that our captive birds are very cautious with people they don’t know. This parent is suspicious of the person with the camera, as I’m not someone who they’ve seen before. The cygnets are staying close to mom and don’t wander far.
One of the main benefits of raising our birds under semi-natural conditions is that they don’t become excessively habituated to humans and maintain a healthy skepticism about our motives. These traits will serve the young swans well when they’re released as young adults.