Volume 4

British birds with their nests and eggs / by Arthur G. Butler [and others] Illustrated by F. W. Frohawk.

Date:
[1896-1898]
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: British birds with their nests and eggs / by Arthur G. Butler [and others] Illustrated by F. W. Frohawk. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    According to Naumann, incubation lasts five weeks; the cygnets are very slow in growing, and are not able to fly before the end of August or September. Swans feed on vegetable substances, as grass, and shoots of shrubs and trees, and the roots and leaves of water plants, which their long necks enable them to tear up from the bottom of the rivers, and shallows of the lakes they frequent. They will also eat grain when it can be got. The wild Swan when swimming carries its neck straight and erect, on the contrary the tame Swan usually has it gracefully curved, a difference which the naturalist Pennant remarked upon more than a century since. One unfailing distinction between the two is in the bill. In Cygnus musiciis, this has the basal part, to below the nostrils, and some distance along the lateral margin of the upper mandible, yellow, the rest black. In C. olor, the bill is reddish-orange, with the base and lores black, also a prominent black tubercle, in adults, above the nostrils. The colours are thus reversed. Mr. H. J. and C. B. Pearson (“ The Ibis,” 1893, p, 243) say, in Iceland, “ this was the only species of Swan we observed. Bggs were taken on June 20th and 28th, but the weather among the hills had been so bad this spring, that several pairs were only commencing to prepare their nests about the latter date. We afterwards saw a clutch of seven eggs which had been recently taken. Although these birds sometimes breed on islands in the inhabited districts, it is little use to look for their eggs before you pass the last farm, as they are generally taken to eat or sell.” Saxby (“ Birds of Shetland ”) says:—“ sometimes, though very rarely, the Swans return northwards as early as the end of February, but the usual time is during the months of March and April. The flocks which arrive in spring are much smaller than those which pass southwards in autumn, * * spring, the greater number arrive late in the evening, or very early in the morning, when there is little stirring below; whereas in autumn, they most frequently pass over in broad daylight, when the people are gathering in their harvest * * * *. During flight they utter a soft, rather melancholy cry, resembling the words wAo- wko-who, repeated many times in succession; on a calm spring evening, about twilight, or as the Shetlanders say ‘ in the dim,’ these sounds have a strange— one might almost say, a solemn effect.” There is no sound in nature more likely to attract attention than the aerial music of a herd of migrating Swans passing high over-head; some speak of it as exhilarating to the highest degree, but to me there is always a touch of sadness in the sound—the sadness of Highland music in those long drawn, melancholy, and plaintive notes, which seem suggestive of the illimitable wilds of the great lone-lands where the birds have passed the long day of the short Arctic summer.