The Swan in Your Park Is Invasive. Michigan Shoots Them

💰 Support the channel: USDT TRC20: TBebXWjFeAJHfArVsJvt8N6Yv5rvn4GXP7 The white swan on an American park pond is an invasive species in several states. Wealthy Americans imported mute swans from Europe for their estates in the late 1800s, five escaped on Maryland's Eastern Shore in 1962, and by 1999 Chesapeake Bay had about 4,000. Meanwhile America's own swan, the trumpeter, the heaviest flying bird on the continent, was killed for powder puffs, hat feathers and quill pens until a 1932 survey found only 69 left in the lower 48 states. This film puts a swan on the scale. A swan is about as heavy as a bird can be and still fly, and that weight makes everything slow: a 100-yard running start, a month every summer when it cannot fly at all, more than 100 days before a cygnet takes off, years before a swan breeds, and a partner kept for life. That slowness explains both American stories: why the trumpeter took over 80 years to come back, and why the imported mute swan, which nothing here hunts, keeps spreading. Along the way: whooper swans tracked by radar at 27,000 feet, the windpipe coiled inside a trumpeter's breastbone, the hunter who heard a dying swan sing in 1898, 4,000 pairs and 2 divorces at Slimbridge, Petra the black swan and her pedal boat, the King's swans and Swan Upping on the Thames, the court case that briefly protected mute swans, the warm springs of Montana's Centennial Valley, E. B. White's Trumpet of the Swan, lead shot in the mud, and how to tell a mute swan from a trumpeter on your own pond. 👍 Subscribe for a new wildlife documentary every week. #swan #swans #trumpeterswan #muteswan #wildlife #wildlifedocumentary #animalfacts #naturedocumentary #birds #birding #invasivespecies #conservation #michigan #chesapeakebay #natureeducation