by Matt Merritt
These whoopers, like most of their species who spend their winters in Britain, have arrived from Iceland, although a few birds from the Russian and Fenno-Scandian breeding populations may make their way here too. At least three-quarters of the Icelandic birds – perhaps 15,000 in total – head south each autumn, and from September through to the end of November they make the journey of at least 600 miles in a single flight, and start dropping in to their wintering grounds. These include much of Ireland, the Severn estuary, Morecambe Bay, the Solway Firth, and a host of locations in Northumberland and Scotland.
Nowhere else are they quite so concentrated, and so easy to see at relatively close quarters, as here, in the seemingly unpromising surroundings of one of the most intensively farmed areas of Britain. At the RSPB’s Ouse Washes reserve, and even more so at the Wildfowl & Wetlands Trust’s nearby Welney reserve, large flocks can be seen throughout the winter. And there’s always the chance of further arrivals: harsh weather back in the land of ice and fire can change the minds of stay-behind birds and send them arrowing towards East Anglia as well.
The Ouse Washes are part of the flood management scheme that transformed a former wilderness into an agricultural paradise. As the Ouse, and a little further north, the Nene, emerge from the rolling hills of the Midlands and start to cross the flatlands of Cambridgeshire, they’re transformed from meandering ribbons, narrowed by reeds or widened by pools, to uniformly wide, dead-straight canals, rivers shaped and harnessed to man’s purpose. That said, perhaps they’re merely trained, rather than tamed, because every winter, as the waters flow off the clay and ironstone hills of the English Midlands, the Ouse and the Nene and the Welland reassert themselves and remind us that they are not to be trifled with. On my own drive to work, across Leicestershire and Rutland, a few days of rain is enough to turn the wide valley between Caldecott and Duddington into a myriad of little lakes and pools, brimful of wigeon, teal and other wildfowl. Further downstream, past Peterborough and Whittlesey, the result is even more spectacular, and the rivers spill out onto the fields widely and seemingly wildly.
Except it’s not really wild. It’s a trade-off. When the Fens were drained, men were sensible enough to realise that in winter it would be impossible to wholly restrain the run-off of a huge part of central England, so they built sluices and drains and channels that would enable them to inundate the land close to the rivers in a controlled fashion. These are the Washes. Even in summer, they can be very damp and largely given over to grazing rather than arable farming, but in winter and spring they revert to the genuine wetland they once were. And, as you might imagine, that attracts a lot of birds, especially waders and wildfowl.
In a place such as Welney, whooper swans look perfectly at home. The changed landscape – a vast sky-mirror broken here and there by trees and power lines, virtually the only feature to betray a human presence – doesn’t look so different from the birds’ summer home in Iceland. It’s flatter, certainly, but the earth, where it can be seen, has the same black hue, albeit thanks to the high peat content rather than volcanic ash. However, these swans are actually Johnny-come-latelies, who only really started to arrive in great numbers in the 1980s, the reserve having been created way back in 1968. At that time, it was already known as a major wintering area for their close relative, the smaller, more delicate-looking Bewick’s swan, which arrives from the Arctic regions of Scandinavia and Russia – but the whoopers knew a good thing when they saw it.
For a start, both Welney and the RSPB reserve sit in the middle of an immense arable area, which means that fields full of winter wheat, potatoes and sugar beet are never far away. On top of which, these wildlife sanctuaries offer somewhere for large numbers of these big, conspicuous birds to roost safely. Finally, to cap it all off, the Wildfowl & Wetlands Trust soon started feeding the swans and other wildfowl, reducing the birds’ need to forage far and wide.
Feeding the birds might seem like cheating when it comes to attracting two species so emblematic of the wild northern wastes, but the activity has a dual purpose. On the one hand, it does ensure that the birds don’t go hungry even during the hardest winter weather, and as such it’s only a larger-scale version of what so many of us do at home, filling up the feeders so that our favourite robin or blackbird makes it through another year. On the other hand, it also removes any need for the swans to go roving too far in search of sustenance, something that could bring them to grief on one of the aforementioned power lines (although precautions such as high-visibility discs on the wires have reduced deaths greatly), as well as into conflict with the farmers of Cambridgeshire and Norfolk. While they’re hoovering up unwanted beet tops, or picking through stubble, they’re a picturesque and evocative addition to any farming scene, but even a relatively small flock of whoopers or Bewick’s can do a great deal of damage to a crop that’s still in the ground.
Welney’s whoopers, then, and Bewick’s swans for that matter, are prime examples of species that have taken full advantage of the opportunities that man has offered them, both intentionally and inadvertently. There can be around 2,000 of the former and 5,000 of the latter present in this area at the height of winter, turning the dull watercolours of the Washes into a shimmering snowfield that is testament to the conservation efforts of several organisations – and one man in particular.
Sir Peter Scott was the son of a British hero – the tragic polar explorer Captain Robert Falcon Scott – who became one himself, albeit for quite different reasons. Indeed, the roots of Sir Peter’s entire life’s work can be found in his father’s last, poignant letter to his wife, written as he awaited death in a tent just eleven miles from safety in a ten-day Antarctic blizzard. ‘Make the boy interested in natural history if you can; it is better than games,’ he advised.
The boy, Peter, was just two years old at the time, but over the next seventy-eight years he was to become arguably the most influential British conservationist and ornithologist of the twentieth century, not to mention a major figure in both fields internationally. After serving in the Royal Navy in the Second World War, and unsuccessfully standing as a Conservative candidate in the 1945 general election, Peter Scott founded the Severn Wildfowl Trust at Slimbridge, Gloucestershire, close to where the wide waters of the River Severn open out into the Bristol Channel – some of the richest and most important wintering grounds for waders and wildfowl in Europe.
One of his early successes was saving the nene, or Hawaiian goose, from extinction by means of a captive-breeding programme, a technique that has since been used successfully with a number of other threatened species. He would go on to help found the World Wide Fund for Nature and carry out ornithological work that has shaped conservation around the world; but his most lasting legacy is here in the UK. The Severn Wildfowl Trust became the Wildfowl & Wetlands Trust, with nine large reserves across the UK, including at Welney, although Slimbridge remains the heart of everything it does, indelibly associated with Scott and his work.
This included, in 1964, deducing that each Bewick’s swan has an absolutely unique pattern of yellow and black markings on its bill, enabling scientists to easily identify individual birds from one year to the next. Scott actually painted little mugshots of each bird, and gave them names, initiating one of the longest-running wildlife studies in the world. This has enabled the WWT to keep a very close eye on how the birds are doing on a wider scale.
As with most species, numbers across Europe have fluctuated over a long period, but in the mid-1990s there were thought to be around 30,000 birds in total. A 2010 survey, however, showed as few as 18,000 left, with power lines, poisoning from lead shot, and illegal hunting blamed for the dramatic decline. In Britain, too, numbers have declined, although they vary anyway according to the weather. In colder winters, more swans are forced this far west, but in milder years, many stop short and spend the winter in the Netherlands, or even further east.
Whoopers, on the other hand, are doing pretty well on a world scale, and back at Welney t
hey’ve become the unwitting but obliging stars of one of Britain’s greatest wildlife shows. Only a couple of weeks after watching those first birds arrive, I’m back there on a clear, frosty afternoon as the sun starts to sink below the horizon.
The hide at Welney is unlike practically any other in British birdwatching. It’s a heated observatory with plenty of seating, and a glass front that affords views right out across the sea that is, for at least part of the year, the fields of Cambridgeshire and Norfolk. Accordingly, it has attracted a quite different gathering from what you might expect to find in the typically draughty, creaky, glorified garden shed that is the average hide. There’s a scattering of obvious birdwatchers, for certain, including three or four hefting huge zoom lenses on their Nikons and Canons, and others with tell-tale spotting scopes, but at least 75 per cent of the people present show no signs of being fully in the throes of a birdwatching addiction. If they have binoculars – and far from all of them do – these tend to be one of two kinds: either chunky, passed-down-from-granddad ex-forces types, or compact, pocket-sized models as sold at special offer price in certain national newspapers. There’s a heartening range of ages, from five to at least eighty-five, and a high number of families.
The light has faded. The natural light that is, because outside the observatory huge floodlights (appropriately enough) are now illuminating the wide waters, silhouetting a group of pochards, with their distinctively pointy-headed outline, and a loose flock of bickering mallards. Here and there a black-tailed godwit stands hunched, as if pondering whether to continue feeding under this artificial daylight, or to fly off to somewhere quieter and darker. And swans are gathering, slowly but steadily, in a 180-degree arc around the great glass window. Some fly in from a day spent gleaning whatever sustenance they can find from the surrounding fields, and arrive with a showy splashdown. Others, given the numbers involved, must be swimming in via unseen channels and creeks, having already spent some of the day on the reserve. Next to the smaller, duller ducks and waders, they appear both much bigger and much more real, their whiteness giving them a cleaner, sharper outline than the grey and brown birds around them. Only here and there is a swan still muddied by the day’s exertions, the grubby stains on their plumage threatening to relegate them, if only temporarily, from the divine to the profane.
Inside the observatory, there’s a hum of expectation that creates an atmosphere in itself. It’s welcome, because although there’re lots of good things to be said for a hide designed with the watchers’ comfort in mind, one downside is that it appears to have shut out the noise of the birds themselves. Not just that of the swans, but the exhilarating whistle of the many wigeon bobbing somewhere just beyond the floodlights’ reach, and the mixed clamour of every other bird sounding off before the long silence of the fenland night. Every now and then, as a door opens somewhere behind us, we catch a snatch of their voices raised to the winter stars, letting a little bit of the northern wilderness creep back into us.
Now any football or rugby fan will tell you that there’s something very special about a floodlit match: it’s to do, of course, with the smell of the damp, cold night air mixed with cigarette smoke and the heady aromas of meat pies, beer and Bovril; but it’s also a lot to do with the way the lights create a little illuminated block in which you, the other spectators and the players are trapped for ninety minutes or so, with the whole of the outside world reduced to a dull, shadowy blur.
And that’s what happens. In daylight, even if we were similarly waiting for a particular natural spectacle to begin, we’d be scanning the landscape and skies beyond the reserve, hoping to turn up something unexpected or unusual. Here, we have no choice but to focus on the relatively small stage before us, expectant but not impatient to know what’s about to unfold. It ought to feel restrictive, but it’s not. It’s liberating, in fact, to know that you can concentrate your whole attention solidly on a single phenomenon.
As I sit there, it even strikes me that perhaps those among us without binoculars might have a point. Raise a pair of modern optics to your eyes and you can be astounded by the pin-sharpness of the image, and by how natural the colour is, and yet, no matter how advanced the binoculars are, how wide the field of view, you’ll still find your view circumscribed to a relatively narrow tunnel of vision. Outside it, anything can – and probably is – happening. For once, the naked eye might be the better bet, allowing you to take in the whole scope of what’s going on.
There’s movement outside. A WWT employee is padding around in front of the observatory, carrying a huge bucket. He stops and dips a large scoop into it, then flings corn out onto the dark waters. Within seconds the loose smattering of drifting floes has been consolidated into a single huge iceberg that dwarfs the darker shapes of the mallards and pochards around them. Long necks lunge towards the floating grain to snaffle it before it sinks, and although there’s plenty to go round, there’s all the squabbling and bickering that you might expect from hundreds and hundreds of large, hungry birds who know how hard even an East Anglian winter can be.
It’s a curiously domestic-looking scene, rather like farmyard geese being fed, only on a much larger and grander scale; and yet every time a head turns and there’s a flash of tell-tale yellow and black on the bill, you’re reminded that these birds spend half their year in the remotest, bleakest parts of the Arctic; and a little shiver runs down your spine, in recognition of their utter wildness, as well, maybe, as in sympathy for what they must go through.
That duality to their nature is, I think, what keeps me and hundreds of other birdwatchers coming back to Welney year after year. Whooper and Bewick’s swans seem to encompass the entire range of the birdwatching experience within the great arcs of their migratory flights. Their whiteness is a blank screen onto which any of us can project our own motivations for birding, from the thrill of seeing rare and scarce creatures in their natural habitat, to the simple pleasure, originating right back in childhood, of seeing waterbirds being fed.
And the swans carry so much with them on their long flights out of the north. Not only the glamour, exoticism and romance of coming from places most of us will never visit, but scientific considerations as well. Like most migratory birds, they’re the bearers of messages on the state of the planet; in the case of the Bewick’s swans, rather worrying messages that speak of deforestation and habitat degradation in Siberia.
For now, the swans keep on coming and going, until they’ve all had their fill of the food being scattered, and one or two watchers slip out of the observatory; but for the most part we remain transfixed by this strange sight until the last of the birds drifts away across the water to take up its roosting place for the night.
Back in the car, I have a long drive ahead of me. I’m travelling down a long, straight stretch alongside one of the ‘cuts’ or ‘drains’ that criss-cross the flatlands, and as the moon emerges from behind cloud, it picks out two large white shapes tucked in to the far bank. Mute swans. The wind ruffles the feathers of their wings and backs for a moment, like a breeze whipping up little whirlwinds of snow, but they sail on, oblivious to weather and passing traffic, seeming more wild and remote than even their migratory cousins did earlier in the evening.
Swans occupy a prominent place in our culture. In part, this is down to their historical status as royal birds. The Crown was considered to own every swan, although nobles and gentry might be granted local ownership rights too, and certainly carried out the day-to-day management of the population. And, although monarchs no doubt valued these birds for their ornamental value – what estate isn’t enhanced by their graceful presence? – the main reason they were guarded so jealously was that they formed the centrepieces of many a banquet.
There’s a temptation in Britain to ascribe most legislation conferring ownership of wild animals and birds on the upper echelons of society to the Normans – certainly they introduced the hated forest laws, which prevented peasants from hunting not only deer, but more modest game, such as
rabbits. Where swans are concerned, however, the process had started well before 1066 and the arrival of William the Bastard, as his English subjects were wont to call him. A century earlier, in 966, King Edgar had granted the monks of Crowland Abbey rights over the resident swans (the abbey being a short flight away from those mute swans I watched floating on the drain), and the laws and customs regarding the birds may have accumulated over the next few hundred years until, in 1482, they started to be formalised into what were known as the swan laws. Swans were expensive to raise, and their meat was a highly valued delicacy, so there were harsh penalties for anyone caught interfering with them or their eggs. They continued to be the table item of highest prestige until the seventeenth century saw the introduction of the cheaper and easier-to-handle turkey from the New World.
But vestiges of our former swan culture – or should that be industry – still remain. Every July, a stretch of the Thames sees ‘swan-upping’, in which the Queen’s Swan Marker and the representatives of the Vintners and Dyers livery companies catch and mark as many swans as possible; and at Abbotsbury in Dorset, hundreds of mute swans inhabit the same site that their kind has occupied for at least 700 years, having originally been kept by the monks of the local abbey.
All this might help explain why swans figure so prominently in the names and signs of pubs. They were a familiar, aesthetically pleasing and easily recognisable image; they had an aspirational quality (while dining on lesser fare in the hostelry, you could imagine yourself at a royal feast); and perhaps most importantly of all, they were regularly used in heraldry. Thus a landlord might have the swan as his sign to curry favour with, or show affiliation to, a particular member of the local gentry.
But history is only part of the story. The British mute swan population of 45,000 or so adults is around half the European total, and at least part of their success here is due to the location. Like the whoopers and Bewick’s, these are essentially northern birds, so our cool but largely benevolent climate suits them down to the ground. It’s only when you birdwatch outside Britain that you realise just how favoured we are. In the rest of Europe, mute swans are thinly scattered and sometimes hard to find. Even further afield, the black-necked swan of South America and the black swan of Australasia have their own charm, but somehow feel second best. When the British say ‘swan’, we mean something huge and snow-white – part-angel, part-apparition, part-domestic animal.
