Where’s the best place to be in a hot, smoky summer of fires? A wetland, of course! While the rest of us were sweating and fretting, our swans seem to have fared just fine in spite of some major fires that burned in the surrounding mountains. Nineteen of the twenty cygnets that hatched in May and June have survived and are now in the process of learning to fly.
When the cygnets hatched in the spring, they weighed about 7 ounces. In an astonishing feat of growth, they gained up to 20% of their body weight every day for a few weeks, at some point increasing by a pound a week, until reaching about 20 pounds at this time of year. Their early diet was composed mostly of protein-rich insects and other aquatic invertebrates, which enabled this rapid growth. Not only were they gaining weight and getting larger, they were also growing all the body and flight feathers they will need to carry them to their wintering grounds in a few short weeks.
The cygnets will soon take to the air in short flights across the wetlands, and make longer flights in the area with their parents as their flight muscles grow stronger. Sometime before freeze-up they will leave the watershed in family groups, heading for wintering areas to the south, where waterways remain open and aquatic vegetation is accessible. There they will mix with Tundra Swans from the north and other Trumpeter Swans from the Canadian and American Rocky Mountain region. In the spring the family will migrate north again to the Blackfoot, and the adults will chase their offspring off their territory in anticipation of producing a new batch of young. The yearlings will likely stay together and perhaps join other young swans for the summer. At two years of age they will begin to seek their own mates and territories.
We had to cancel our fall Swan Release event due to wildfire proximity and smoke. The captive cygnets we planned to release will be held in captivity over the winter and released in the Blackfoot next year under better conditions.