Heralded return
Trumpeter swans find new home in Pablo
Issue Date: 6/24/2010
Last Updated: 2/17/2014 3:54:11 PM |
By
Melea Burke
PABLO — It took a little shooing from wildlife manager Dale Becker, but once the swans spotted the cattails and glassy water, a chorus of trumpeting broke out and the giant white birds bailed out of the straw-lined horse trailer. In a heartwarming scene reminiscent of a Disney movie, the young swans waddled eagerly toward the pond, splashing their way into their new home.
The release of 20 yearling trumpeter swans was the latest step in a 14-year-old trumpeter swan reintroduction program led by the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes. Prior to the mid-1800s, the native trumpeters dotted the lakes and ponds around Northwestern Montana. Jesuit missionary Father Pierre Jean DeSmet even noted in his journals that he saw trumpeter swans nesting on Flathead Lake.
“They were a relatively common bird back in pre-settlement days,” said Becker, CSKT Fish and Wildlife manager.
But that changed over the years as people moved West, hunting the birds for their skins and meat, and displacing trumpeters from their natural habitats.
“Birds were just easy food,” Becker explained. “They’re fairly tame and docile, so it’s easy for people to catch up with them.”
Yellowstone National Park and nearby Red Rocks Lake National Wildlife Refuge were the final strongholds for trumpeter swans in the western United States, but now there are ongoing reintroduction projects in Idaho and Oregon, as well as Montana.
In 1996, CSKT joined forces with state and federal fish and wildlife services and several other partner agencies to begin reintroducing trumpeter swans on the Flathead Reservation.
Similar programs in several Midwestern states, South Dakota and Wyoming have all been successful in restoring healthy numbers of the waterfowl, and Becker believes the local effort is well on its way to meeting the project goal: documentation of at least 10 productive breeding pairs for a continuous three-year period.
Since 2002, 162 of the birds have been released on the Reservation. The reintroduced swans hatched 60 cygnets and fledged 49 from 2004-2009, and so far this year, wildlife biologists have counted 21 cygnets at six nests, Becker said, and they may still find more.
“I wouldn’t be surprised if we picked up another nest or two,” he said.
The 20 birds released last week were raised in captivity as part of breeding programs at the Montana Waterfowl Foundation in Pablo and WJH Bird Resources in Billings. Some of the yearlings also came from egg collections in northern British Columbia, Canada, last year, Becker noted.
“We hold on to (the swans) for the year. It just seems to increase their (viability) a little bit,” Becker explained. “They’ve got kind of a steep learning curve that first year.”
Once the birds are in the wild, they face a variety of challenges, from avoiding natural predators to foraging for food, but civilization remains the main obstacle to their survival.
Collisions with power lines have been responsible for most of the swan deaths recorded since the reintroduction program began, Becker noted.
“That’s been our biggest mortality problem,” he said.
To combat the problem, the CSKT Fish and Wildlife Department marks power lines in high swan-traffic areas, mostly in Ninepipe National Wildlife Refuge, with bright orange ribbons to catch the birds’ attention.
“It seems to work pretty well for us,” Becker said.
This year, above-average rainfall has swamped much of the local swan habitat, submerging the birds’ preferred food source of underwater vegetation in eight to 10 feet of water in many places, Becker explained. Trumpeters prefer to forage and nest on smaller bodies of water like the small ponds around the main Pablo Reservoir, but even the normally shallow ponds have grown to lake-like size.
“We got too much water,” Becker said.
But by the next scheduled trumpeter swan release, summer should have taken a toll on the high water. Another 14 swans, 10 from Montana Waterfowl Foundation and four from Billings, will taste freedom on the Flathead Reservation sometime in July, Becker said.
All of the swans released through the CSKT reintroduction program have red neckbands labeled with white numeric codes to help track the birds' migratory movements. Observers of the marked swans can report their sightings to the CSKT Wildlife Management Program at 883-2888, ext. 7278.
