Next fall, trumpeter swans face the music

Those who live around this remote Rocky Mountain hamlet cherish the trumpeter swans that winter here by the hundreds as living symbols of free-flowing rivers, natural beauty and grace.

Some love them so much that they rushed to their rescue a year ago, when a severe blizzard and sub-zero cold froze nearby Henry’s Fork and the huge white birds were cut off from their diet of aquatic plants.

Fearing a catastrophic loss to starvation, local residents and concerned biologists braved the bitter cold and blasting winds to toss grain to the surviving swans, some of which were so weak from hunger they couldn’t fly. The carcasses of the birds that could not be saved were loaded into a pickup truck and hauled away for analysis.

“I’m tougher than linoleum on an old kitchen floor, but my eyelids were frostbitten, trying to save those swans,” recalled David Hays, 43, publisher of a local weekly, the Bugle.

Now, a year later, state and federal biologists say that the 300 or so people here will have to love the swans enough to chase them away.

The flock has grown too large for the habitat to support it. To disperse the swan population, these biologists intend to greet arriving birds next fall with percussion cannons and traps. Horse trailers will be used to move swans off to foraging grounds elsewhere.

“The intent is to ingrain in (swans’) memories new wintering sites, so that they will bypass Henry’s Fork altogether,” said David Moody, wildlife management coordinator for the Wyoming Game and Fish Department. “We want these birds to learn to migrate instead to locations in central Utah and along the Idaho-Wyoming border.”

The plan, which no one can guarantee will work, has angered locals who fear the hazing will only increase stress on these long-lived creatures of habit that, they say, “have been comin’ here since dirt.”

“Sometimes I wonder if the swans would be better off if these scientists just left them alone,” said Ramona Prophet, 59, an Island Park resident of 11 years.

Ruth Shea, regional biologist for the Idaho Fish and Game Department, said it is too late for that now. Fifty years of dam construction and development have so altered the environment that the swan, largest of all North American waterfowl, cannot survive without drastic intervention efforts.

“Last winter’s storm was almost the last nail in the coffin,” Shea said, “but man built the coffin.”

Each winter, Henry’s Fork, a mirror-flat river that meanders across the vast caldera of an active volcano in southeastern Idaho, is home to about a third of the 2,000 breeding trumpeters known to live in the continental United States and Canada.

So many swans wintering in one place makes them vulnerable to disease and cold snaps such as the one that killed at least 100 of them in February, 1989, Shea said.

And recent studies have suggested that the river and its limited supply of aquatic plants can not sustain the growing population of these voracious eaters much longer. A single adult swan, Shea said, consumes about 20 pounds of vegetable matter a day.

“We now believe that even if we have enough water in the river to keep it ice-free in the worst of winters, the swans are going to eat Henry’s Fork bare and starve to death,” Shea said.

Last year, potato growers downstream, facing a third year of drought, had reduced the winter outflow from a nearby dam. At the last minute, Shea and others persuaded the irrigators to release enough water to melt the ice and save most of the swans.

It is not the first time the trumpeter swan, which once ranged across North America, has been in a precarious situation. Hunted for skins, plumage and flesh, the species ( Olor buccinator ) was thought to be extinct until 70 trumpeters were discovered in this area in the early 1930s.

Conservation efforts since have helped to increase their number, but Hays and others worry that the science of relocating migratory trumpeter swans is so new that biologists may, unwittingly, “manage the wildlife out of existence.” But Shea said there is too much at stake to do nothing.

“It has been hard to persuade people just how serious this problem is,” he said, “but I am not going to let these birds die in vain.”