Birds & Bards
Mute Swan
Photo by Mark Seth Lender
Wild Swans
I looked in my heart while the wild swans went over.
And what did I see I had not seen before?
Only a question less or a question more;
Nothing to match the flight of wild birds flying.
Tiresome heart, forever living and dying,
House without air, I leave you and lock your door.
Wild swans, come over the town, come over
The town again, trailing your legs and crying.
--Edna St. Vincent Millay (1882-1950)
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Field Notes
The Mute Swan (made famous in all our childhoods by Disney and Tchaikovsky) does not belong here. The entire stock spread from pairs imported from Europe in the late 19th Century. Or maybe not. Lewis (of Lewis and Clark), writing in the expedition's Weather Journal on July 4, 1804, reports he went ashore alone and saw "a great number of young geese and swan." This was just across what would become the Kansas/Missouri border near a place they named Independence Creek in honor of the young nation they had set out to explore. If Lewis saw swans, given the heat and the time of year they could only have been Mute Swans. Others, recording what they had seen earlier that same day remarked only of geese. Perhaps Lewis was tired, or maybe he was right. All I can tell you is that I remember the first time swans flew directly over me, seven of them in a perfect V, wings beating in unison, wingtips whistling. I was standing on the shore of Tisbury Great Pond next to a young woman I knew and after the swans passed neither of us spoke or made a sound for a long time.--Mark Seth Lender
