Researchers guide return of trumpeter swans
HURST, Ill. -- A record 71 trumpeter swans -- our continent's biggest birds with wingspans as wide as your sofa -- are wintering on the secluded Burning Star No. 5 coal mine, a 6,000-acre gated, reclaimed, former strip mine, now teeming with wildlife, wetlands and crops.
On a blustery day in January, biologists with the Cooperative Wildlife Research Laboratory in charge of the study took visitors for a rare glimpse of the secretive swans.
Their truck bounced over gravel roads snaking deep within the Consolidated Coal Co. property with its lakes and rolling landscape.
After rounding a bend, they braked a quarter-mile from a bright-green swath of winter wheat. In the distance, seven trumpeter swans, legs folded beneath snowy-white bodies, hunkered down for an afternoon siesta. A separate trio foraged off to one side.
"They're a beautiful bird in that they were extirpated by people, and now they're being brought back by people," says Faye M. Babineau, a master's student in zoology who is also guiding observations and data collection on the birds.
"I'd like to do it responsibly. We have an opportunity to help form intelligent, science-based management plans that will actually aid the species," adds the 25-year-old Babineau.
She says in pre-settlement times, 100,000 trumpeter swans graced North America's lakes and skies. By the 1930s, they had been hunted to the brink of extinction. Hat makers coveted their plumes and quills, and Europe's fashionistas powdered their noses with puffs made from swan skins.
Thanks to captive breeding and reintroduction efforts begun out West, the number of trumpeter swans is on the rise. The Pacific Coast population is the largest, with flocks stretching into Canada and Alaska and totaling an estimated 17,000. In the 1980s, reintroduction efforts brought swans to the Midwest, where they now number around 2,400.
Yet trumpeter swans, which average about 20 to 30 pounds apiece and stand 4 feet tall, face a number of pressures.
Initially, they lack any sort of migratory tradition, which must be passed from one generation to the next. And if well-meaning folks feed them up north, they grow reluctant to leave summer breeding sites. If the swans do take wing, they discover developers have gobbled up preferred winter-feeding grounds.
That's why the University's wildlife professionals are working dawn to dusk to get a handle on swans' favorite spaces. Overseeing it all is Alan Woolf, director of the wildlife laboratory.
Babineau says, "We hope to identify key factors for trumpeter swans during winter. We're starting by observing the birds and getting to know their requirements and needs. No one else has studied this population's winter habitat needs. There have been studies out West, but there's such different habitat and weather conditions there. You can't really base a management plan (for Midwest swans) on data collected there."
Collars on more than half of the birds, including lightweight radio transmitters on eight, help her and field assistant Jennifer M. Triplett home in on the swans' locations and track individual behaviors.
"I can already tell that so far they've selected winter wheat above all else," Babineau says, nodding toward swans filling up on the crop.
Researchers also note flock movements, preferred habitats, courting activities, predation and the like.
But perhaps above all, says Babineau, "the swans chose the mine for some reason, and I want to look at the land-use composition here to see if it exists anywhere else in Southern Illinois."
Seven or eight swans first flocked to the mine in the mid-1990s. Loyal to sites where they've been successful, they've returned every winter since. Now in tow are lifelong mates, offspring and a few stragglers who joined along the way.
Gene A. Smount is a project engineer for Consolidated Coal Co. and spent most of his career overseeing reclamation at Burning Star No. 5.
"We have a tremendous wildlife population at all of our mines, this one in particular. It's always been something Consol has prided itself on, and the swans are just the icing on the cake," Smout says.
- Paula M. Davenport
March 6, 2002
University scientists are doing the first study of its kind on these birds in hopes of increasing their survival.
