Photography by Jennifer Silverberg
In winter, about 10 phone calls a day come into the Audubon Center at the Riverlands Migratory Bird Sanctuary, near Alton, from folks hoping to see swans. “Some days, it’s nonstop,” says the center’s executive director, Ken Buchholz, “and one of the first questions visitors ask when they walk in the center is ‘Where are the swans today?’”
That is, trumpeter swans—Cygnus buccinator, our continent’s largest native waterfowl. The ones with the angel-white feathers and black bills, the long necks and wings that stretch wider than a Humvee. The birds who are shielded from hunters by state and federal law and who fly hundreds of miles south each winter to gather at Riverlands by the WAMP-ing thousands.
Most people who inquire at the center are merely swan-curious; Pat Lueders, however, is committed. A retiree and avid birder, Lueders does some professional guiding on overseas bird tours, but at Riverlands, she’s a volunteer who comes every two weeks in the winter to coordinate the official swan count. That means she must arrive before dawn, even in the most frigid weather, then affix her spotter scope to a tripod and get to work. On the morning I meet her there at daybreak, she’s standing in a parking lot with the scope pointed down at a prairie marsh.
“Oh, my God,” she mutters, her eye to the scope. “We’ve got hundreds.”
I take a look. Only their silhouettes are visible, gliding across the water among patches of river bulrush. Their honking is less subtle. It sounds like a really terrible elementary school brass band warming up.
Lueders explains that she’s not doing a formal count this morning. That would require splitting fellow volunteers into teams consisting of an observer (who counts) and a recorder (who scribbles the findings on a form). Each team tackles a different roosting spot. This year, Lueders says, the volunteer pool has shrunk because of COVID. But she keeps coming back, even on non-count days, because she wants to. “It’s just a hobby,” she says, smiling.
Swans have bewitched humans for millennia. They show up in Greek, Norse, and Celtic myths, though storytellers in those European traditions were referencing a distinct species: mute swans, Cygnus olor, which have orange bills with black knobs on top. Here in North America, the most numerous species of swan is actually the tundra swan, Cygnus columbianus, recognizable by the yellow teardrop on its black bill. Tundras migrate mainly between Alaska and the Western states (though some do make it to Riverlands). Their numbers are so robust that hunters can legally bag them in certain regions.
The trumpeters are different. By the early 1900s, market hunting and wetlands drainage had nearly wiped them out in the Lower 48, but since then, they’ve received federal protection. Wildlife managers located a pocket of trumpeters in Alaska and reintroduced some to the Upper Midwest. That group of transplants flourished and grew. Then, in the winter of 1991, a pioneering few of them found their way, somehow, to the Riverlands sanctuary, which had recently been created by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. (The Corps now manages Riverlands with help from Audubon.)
Those first trumpeters flew back north to hatch their eggs but returned in subsequent years with their gray-feathered youngsters, called cygnets, which eventually matured and brought down their offspring, such that nowadays wintering at Riverlands is totally a thing. More than 2,000 have been spotted on a single day at the sanctuary. The peak period appears to be mid-December to mid-January; stragglers may stay into February.
At night, they roost together on the water, where the older cygnets look for mates—no small decision, because trumpeters generally mate for life. Come morning, the birds start bobbing their heads, which means they’re about to take off. Then, one by one, family groups launch from the water and flap to nearby fields to forage for unharvested corn or soybeans. (They avoid certain power lines now because Ameren has fitted them with corkscrew-shaped diverters to make them more visible.)
Yet on the morning of my visit, the swans stay on the water long past sunrise. I ask Lueders why. She laughs: “We don’t know who makes those decisions.” Indeed, according to the Cornell Lab of Ornithology’s website, “several aspects of Trumpeter Swan biology, ecology, and behavior need additional attention”—another way of saying that, in some respects, they’re still a mystery.
I ask her why she keeps birding at Riverlands. She says she learns something new on every outing. “Sure,” I say, “but why not horses or insects or reptiles? What is it about birds?” She smiles again, says nothing, looks through her scope: “I don’t know why, in particular.”
At 9:01 a.m., just before I drive off, a group splashes out of the marsh. They heave straight for us. As they veer away, their long necks straining forward, we get the profile: a lustrous white adult trailed by four gray cygnets. Their thick wings make a whisper. The last one lets out a final honk so loud it echoes in the cold marsh. On my drive home, I can still hear it.
