peterography

The office park adjacent to my company’s campus takes the “park” portion of its description seriously. Scattered among its four office buildings and two hotels are almost a dozen ponds and countless glades, woods, landscaped lawns, marshes and footpaths. It’s a far cry from the lovely wild forest and meadow with coyote and fox that I used to see out my office window when I first went to work here in 1994, but, as they say, that’s ‘progress’. Some of the ponds are manicured and sculpted pools with fountains and elaborate stonework and others are semi-wild and surrounded by reeds, tall grass and trees.

Many of these ponds have Mute Swans in residence. Most of these swans are rented. I once made the mistake of calling one a “leased swan” when talking to an ornithological-minded coworker and she thought I said “Least Swan”. The smaller varieties of several bird species are called “least”, for example the Least Bittern, Least Flycatcher or Least Tern and it took a while to deobfuscate that conversation.

Besides Mute swans I’ve seen rented Black Swans - a species native to Australia - and rented Mandarin Ducks and I used to think that the only purpose of such bird-rental was ornamentation. But the companies that supply the swans promote their ability to keep Canada Geese, and their droppings, away. My company’s solution to the goose problem is styrofoam coyotes which are far less graceful and pretty, but we don’t have any good swan ponds.

Yet the Mute Swan itself is regarded as a pest species. A native of Europe, it was introduced to North America in the 19th century to beautify the ponds of wealthy estate owners, and it soon began to drive out native waterfowl using the same aggressive and territorial nature that drives geese away. Most states along the east coast now require that Mute Swans be either pinioned or neutered to limit their growth and federal legislation and regulations to reduce their populations has been tied up in disputes and court challenges for years. Yet by now the orange bill and gracefully curved neck of the Mute has become the public’s idea of a swan. The Swan Boats in the Boston Public Gardens depict Mute Swans and the average person can hardly imagine a Trumpeter Swan or Tundra Swan, our two native species.

None of these existential issues were likely on the minds of a pair of Mutes who appeared a month ago on one of the outlying ponds. They showed up weeks before the birds on the spiffier ponds with the fountains near the corporate atriums so they may have been wild swans just looking for a place to raise a family. They set right to work building a nest on the wide end of a little feather of a pond near our corporate gate. The tiny sliver of water presses hard against our chain link fence on one side, and is bordered on the other side by a landscaped grassy slope. At one tip of this pond is a busy intersection and at the other a reedy swamp.

Mute Swans like to build their nests in a shallow spot in the middle of the water. And  after a day of hard work during which they often sat back to back, looking like one large white two-headed nest building creature, they had a fine nest.  Then they abandoned the pond.

I found them the next day in another outlying pond, building another nest. Their new pond was bigger and better protected from traffic and passers-by. It also wasn’t at the bottom of a landscaped slope, which had worried me at the first location because I saw no weeds in the grass there so I assumed it was treated with weed killer, which can’t be good for raising cygnets in.

After another day of hard work they had another fine nest. Then they vanished again.

They had returned to the first pond. One swan  was sitting serenely on the nest and the other circled it warily, eyeing me with suspicion. The eggs had been laid.

That was a few weeks ago. Sometimes I see them both in their pond and sometimes only one. Mute Swans have very little sexual dimorphism and they share egg-sitting duty, so there’s no telling which is the male and which is the female. The other day I discovered where the missing swan goes. It visits the decorative ponds near the big shiny office buildings, which by now have their own swans, not to mention well-stocked feeders. This journey is hazardous – crossing several lanes of busy traffic and then having to contend with the swans that are already there.

Some of the other swans are also sitting on eggs. In fact right now the whole office park is in a family way - today at lunch I watched a robin tend its nest, I was beset by a redwing blackbird protecting its nesting territory, and I paused to watch a pair of geese guide their six little golden goslings across the grass from one pond to another. I’ll try to report on the progress of these families in future blog entries.