Date: 5/19/25 9:04 am From: Doug Forsell via groups.io <djforsell...> Subject: Re: [Mendobirds] Five Mute Swans on Tuesday
Tim,
Just to elaborate and respond to a few of your of your statements. Vern Stotts was a mentor of mine and I spent over 50 days conducting boat or aerial surveys with him. He was a young waterfowl biologist for the State of Maryland when those swans escaped. They had that same attitude as you, that they probably wouldn’t survive or cause much harm and didn’t control them. I'm sure he felt it was the biggest mistake of his career. Attached is a picture of swans in an SAV bed that without the swans would be solid vegetation and have resulted in more seeds and tubers for the waterfall when they return in the fall.
Yes, most swans do not attack people, but some with excessive hormones protecting their nests do, and they have knocked boats over. When they attack they fly/run accross the water and strike with their inner wing. A friend of mine in collage heard his 5 year old yelling and came out of the house to find one of his 'pet' swans standing on the child's chest pecking him in the face. I have been confronted by three swans on a trail at Cape May, and a 25-30 pound bird in threat posture and calling is quite intimidating. I had to take off my binoculars and swing them tin a circle to get by the birds. Usually people do not call FWS or DNR to come kill swans unless there is a real problem.
Snow geese don’t feed in the Chesapeake Bay proper where the submersed aquatic vegetation grows, although there are occasional eat outs in the marshes, and sometimes those areas become invaded by Phragmites. Snow geese mostly feed on winter wheat on the Delmarva Peninsula and up into New Jersey marshes.
Checking the Internet is not research. You should know that it is not comprehensive, there is a lot of misinformation out there, and your browser shows you what it thinks that you want to see. Even if there was social media then, I doubt many people would post having to kill swans.
Your fanciful theory that non-native species eventually blend into the environment is sometimes the case, but those that become invasive and we often do not know which ones and when they will adapt to the environment and become invasive, destroy native wildlife. A couple examples I have experience with follow.
A large part of the recovery of the eastern bluebird is attributed to the hundreds of thousands of nest boxes deployed. I have had to kill hundreds of house sparrows to keep them from killing the bluebirds in the 75 bluebird boxes that I used to monitor on the Naval Academy Golf Course and adjacent lands. If I and thousands of volunteers didn't kill the house sparrows, they would kill or chase away the adult bluebirds and build a nest on top of eggs or chicks in the boxs and the recovery may not have happened. It was considered malpractice to deploy bluebird boxes and not monitor them for house sparrows. Resident Canada geese In the Chesapeake Bay is a great example of how ignoring the problem and hoping they’ll go away is often wishful thinking, and an excuse for poor resource managers to push the problem down the road. In Chesapeake Bay, when live decoys were made illegal, many hunters released their flocks of Canada geese. Over decades they slowly adapted and when there was a problem DNR would move them to other wetland areas thinking they would provided hunting opportunities. Unfortunately, the geese were adapted to living near people, where hunters could not shoot them, and after 60 years the population exploded and overran golf courses, industrial buildings parks, peoples yards, and our native marshes. A prime example was Jug Bay wetlands on the Patuxent River. It was a part a line of low salinity wild rice marshes along the western rivers of the Chesapeake Bay that provide provided stopover habitat for rails, blackbirds, and many other birds during the fall migration. By the mid-1990's, it was largely a mud flat because the resident Canada geese would eat most of the wild rice shoots before they had a chance to grow. Patuxent Wildlife Research Center biologists were studying the decline of sora rails on the area and constructed several exclosures to show the damage the geese were doing. The results were dramatic with lush growth of caged wild rice surrounded by almost bare mud flats. They thought it was about 250 geese causing the problem but ended up having to remove well over 500 birds. In one or two years, the marsh had responded with extensive growth of wild rice and once again provided stop over habitat for birds. Chris Swarth was the manager of one of the preserves and knows the particulars much better than I and hopefully will correct my numbers if I remembered them incorrectly.
I assume you brought that up Midway because of the talk this week, I do not know where you heard of someone being killed or what stories you read on the Internet. I spent three weeks on Midway in 1987 and two weeks in 1989, when it was still under military control and one week in 2016. While we are mostly rebanding albatross with worn bands, I also shot the last non-native cat on the island (eating at least one Bonin Is. Petrel each night), and spent several days studying bird/aircraft strikes. Every aircraft I watched takeoff either collided with a bird or had a very near miss. I had to euthanize two or three of the birds that didn’t die. When my habitat modification suggestions for keeping the birds from crossing the middle of runway were too expensive for the Navy (they were leaving the next year), I recommend that aircraft operations only be conducted at night, and we put that in the wildlife plan that FWS was writing for the Navy. That pretty much solved the problem and is the current practice. Was also recommended Fsher et. al. in the early sixties, when there was a lot more air traffic. They found 300-400 strikes a year which is not acceptable at any airport.
In the Five weeks I spent on the island I remember a C-141 lost its leading edge of a wing (tens of thousands damage I was told) and it had to return, a Coast Guard C130 lost an engine had to return, the C-130 that brought a new engine lost its radio antenna, and a P-3 Orion lost it’s $100,000 nose radar and had to return to the island. Those aircraft that had to return to the island likely had to dump thousands of gallons of fuel into the air over the ocean before they could land.
Aircraft strikes on Midway were a big deal, unfortunately the killing of the birds near the runway might have been a bit excessive and its been 40 years since I read their reports, but I knew Chan Robbins and I'm sure they believed it was the best solution. In those days it may have been a compromise from killing all of them. In light of what we know now the mortality was minuscule compared to what was being caught in longline and gillnet fisheries throughout the north Pacific. By the way, ask Sully Sullenberger about invasive geese as he hit Canada geese and probably resident geese as at that time they outnumbered native geese 4 or 5 to 1 on the Atlantic Flyway.
Finally, your use of the word evolution as if it is inevitable. Of course all wildlife has had to adapt to changing habitats or die. Most non-native plants or animals that are invasive become that way because there's no wildlife or insects feeding on the plant or their seeds. The loss of one individual native plant or animal is habitat loss! That which we all profess to be the crux of the problem with disappearing wildlife. Even one plant that doesn't have a flower that a pollinators can use, doesn't produce a seed that a bird can eat, or doesn't produce a caterpillar that a bird may need to get enough energy to migrate or reproduce is habitat loss. Multiplied by billions of plants means loss of wildlife. When you ignore invasive plants or animals and allow them to become pervasive you have contributed to the degradation of habitat and you should not complain about losing bird numbers. Using the example of geese above, one goose was probably preventing thousands of wild rice plants from growing and producing 10's of thousands of seeds, making migratory birds less fit for their migration. One swan was eating the SAV that would support 5 or 6 ducks or a couple of tundra swans in winter.
No matter how unpalatable the killing of animals or poisoning of plants is, I know no one who enjoys it, if you're unwilling to support invasive plant or animal control you are as much a part of the problem as the people who introduced them. The result is the same, fewer birds.
Doug
Doug,
No question that Mute Swans are invasive; my question is whether that is really a problem, or are we just perceiving it as one because we don't like change? Most invasions go through a phase of rapid population growth, accompanied by dire predictions from biologists of catastrophic consequences, before the ecosystem begins to adapt, the invader population subsides, and the net result is an increase in biodiversity. Evolution continues to happen, whether we like it or not, and species that are well adapted to thrive in an environment will do so.
Are Mute Swans causing any observed harm in California? Is there reason to expect similar effects as you saw in Chesapeake Bay, given that the ecosystems here differ in significant ways?
Aren't Snow Geese also causing disruption to aquatic vegetation in Chesapeake Bay?
I'm also not swayed by people who felt the need to arm themselves against the birds. Somehow, people in Europe manage to coexist with this same species. Americans always overreact to any perceived intrusion into their spaces.
Has a swan ever killed a child? A quick search yielded no reports - only articles about the exact opposite, swans killed by kids. This kind of hyperbole doesn't help people think clearly about a problem (if one even actually exists). As I'm sure you know well, the Navy used a similar argument to kill tens of thousands of Albatrosses on Midway, describing a scenario where an albatross collided with an airplane on takeoff or landing, causing the death of a pilot. No such event ever occurred, yet the Navy continued slaughtering birds for years. I'm sure those men sincerely believed it was a plausible threat. Let's not fall into that kind of belief-based thinking.
Tim
On 5/14/2025 5:19 PM, Doug Forsell via groups.io wrote:
I spent 22 years as the waterfowl biologist for the Chesapeake Bay Program. In the early 1960s, nine mute swans escaped from a private collection in Maryland, and unfortunately they did not consider it a problem. Over 35 years the population eventually grew to over 5,000 individuals, even with control operations on State and Federal refugees.
Over a 10 year period the State of Maryland and the US Fish & Wildlife Service spent many hundreds of thousands of dollars on litigation, surveys, studies to prove what was obvious to anyone who went out in the Bay, that they were eating enormous amounts of submerged aquatic vegetation, and finally to eradicate them. Money that could have been spent helping native wildlife.
Mute swans can be very aggressive in defending their nests and can knock over canoes and attack people. Every spring we would have numerous calls from people who could not use their docks, yards, or waterways near their houses. Some had to carry a baseball bats or golf clubs to defend themselves. I believe the mute swans also displaced about 10,000 to 15,000 of our tundra swans causing them to move to North Carolina to winter.
Because of lawsuits from animal rights groups, we had to go to Congress to have the Migratory Bird Treaty Act modified so we could eradicate the swans before they destroyed all of the submerged aquatic vegetation in the northern portion of Chesapeake Bay.
I caution you in being cavalier about the harm a few swans could do. You may see it differently if you hear about a small child being attacked or killed by a swan or you wonder what happened to your waterfowl when the swans have destroyed the submersed aquatic vegetation.
Hopefully the State has policies on invasive species.
Doug Forsell Point Arena
Sent from the all new AOL app for iOS
