When I think of a swan I think of an ostrich; when I think of a swan and an ostrich, I think of an ostrich swimming, its long legs waving around beneath the surface as it blinks its giant, vague eyes. But of course the most common comparison is with a goose – would a swan seem so perfect if there were not usually a goose hissing somewhere nearby?
The composer Orlando Gibbons (great name), born in England in 1583, wrote a swan song-themed madrigal. As the bird dies, she sings, “Farewell, all joys! O Death, come close mine eyes! / More Geese than Swans now live, more Fools than Wise.”
Swans don’t sing, they honk – it sounds like a clown hitting the horn of his unicycle. The phrase “swan song” comes from the belief that when a swan died, it would release a beautiful call, which turns out to be true-ish of some species. Whooper, trumpeter and tundra swans have an extra tracheal loop. When a whooper swan dies, its lungs collapse, forcing air out in long, sad sounds. In 1898, the zoologist Daniel Giraut Elliot shot a flying tundra swan. As it fell, it made “plaintive and musical” noises which “sounded at times like the soft running of the notes of an octave”, he said.
In 2018, a male swan whose partner had died kept resting his head and neck on the bonnets of cars: perhaps because they were warm, like leftovers wrapped in an aluminium swan, and just the right height.
(Swans also sometimes partner with geese: in New Zealand, a blind goose named Thomas had an 18-year-long relationship with a male black swan named Henry. When Henry mated with a female black swan, Thomas helped raise their chicks. When he died, he was described as an “iconic and well-loved bird”).
When I think of a swan resting its head on the bonnet of a BMW, the scale seems off, and I think of this drawing of a giant swan next to a pygmy elephant. Giant swans, who were around half a million years ago, were only a third bigger than today’s swans but, crucially, they were larger than Maltese pygmy elephants.
Swans form life-long partnerships, but they don’t mate for life. Researchers at the University of Melbourne discovered that swans weren’t monogamous: one in six cygnets was the product of bird adultery – the female swans escaping their monogamous pair bond to mate with other males. “Infidelity is rife,” the researcher said. (The study also showed that “swans of both sexes endowed with elaborate ruffles of curled wing feathers were more likely to find a mate).
Nobody suspects a swan. This is why a nature photographer disguised himself as one, telling the Daily Mail that “Crossing a few metres took an eternity” but, “Nothing could compare to the view I had before me, and the satisfaction of time and effort I put into the implementation of this new way of shooting.”
When I think of a swan, I think of how I would love to curl up on its back, sheltered by soft white feathers, and float away.
Helen Sullivan’s first book, Calcium-Magnesium, will be published in Australia in 2023
