Thrusday, December 24, 1998

Swans reach winter home for Christmas

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Biologist guides them in ultralight

BY BEN L. KAUFMAN
The Cincinnati Enquirer

Wayne Bezner Kerr leads four trumpeter swans into a wildlife refuge near Seymour, Ind. He took the photo with a remote camera mounted to his ultralight. | ZOOM |

        SEYMOUR, Ind. — Four trumpeter swans circled a pond that is to be their winter home and announced their arrival Wednesday with characteristic honks.

        It was the first time in living memory that their sonorous sound has been heard in the 8,000-acre Muscatatuck Na tional Wildlife Refuge.

        Led by half-frozen Wayne Bezner Kerr in an open ultralight, the swans landed and waddled onto a frozen marshy field, and settled down to groom themselves.

        “It's perfect,” the young Canadian biologist said as he eased stiff fingers around a paper cup of coffee brewed by welcoming refuge employees. “Today is wonderful. It's like Christmas and my birthday and New Year's all in one.”

LONG JOURNEY

Check out Wednesday's story about the swans' stopover in Waynesville, Ohio

        The flawless landing — 19 days and 730 miles after they took off from northern Ontario — is the keystone of an experiment that has dominated Mr. Bezner Kerr's life for three years and brought him to the edge of bankruptcy.

        For his master's thesis at Guelph University, he had to find out the best way to raise trumpeter swans to follow an ultralight so he could teach         them migration routes vital to their return to the wild.

        There are no elders to teach the cygnets. Trumpeter swans were hunted to extinction in most of North America in the 19th century; his birds are descended from Alaskan and Yukon survivors.

        He won't know all of the answers until March, when he learns whether his cob (male) and three pens (females) return to South Bay of Ramsay Lake in Ontario.

        All was going well until last Wednesday. They reached Waynesville, Ohio, where awful flying weather and fellow pilot Ken Kennedy's 24-hour flu grounded them.

        If they do, and migrate again next year and in 2000, he expects his swans to breed in Canada and lead their young to Indiana for the winter.

        If they stay here, rather than fly home, it will raise doubts about the potential for such “induced migration,” he said.

        Even today's flight almost failed.

        Mr. Bezner Kerr and the swans took off, but Mr. Kennedy couldn't follow in the second ultralight; ice had fouled his fuel system.

        Mr. Bezner Kerr and the swans circled and landed, but when the engine problem was solved, the swans wouldn't cooperate. They were accustomed to taking off, flying and landing for the day, and they'd just done that.

        “They wouldn't go again,” Mr. Bezner Kerr said. “It was pretty hairy.”

        Resistance was so stubborn that Mr. Bezner Kerr's wife, Rachel, and assistant, Anita Jane Fedoruk, put the birds in a van and hauled them to a nearby airstrip.

        Away from now-familiar surroundings at the Reid Stewart Airfield in Waynesville, the swans followed Mr. Bezner Kerr's lead ultralight into the air as if it were a new day.

        It took 2.5 hours to cover 110 miles, and even though he was wear ing a fully insulated floatation suit, Mr. Bezner Kerr said the cold was “awful.”

        Unlike Mr. Kennedy's enclosed aircraft, his ultralight lacks even a windscreen. He was “shivering so hard the wing was shaking.”

        As he watched the resting swans here, Rachel Bezner Kerr pulled up in their borrowed motor home, followed by Ms. Fedoruk in a van pulling a supply trailer.

        The two young women jumped out, embraced to celebrate the successful end of the voyage, and Rachel Bezner Kerr hugged her husband.

        Then the two women crunched across the marsh with sections of the swans' protective wire pen. Rachel Bezner Kerr assembled it while Ms. Fedoruk fetched buckets of food from the trailer.

        Familiar with the routine, the swans assembled in the pen for dinner and drinks.

        Then unexpected trouble surfaced.

        Coyotes are common in the refuge and the pen will not deter them. The swans were not familiar enough with their winter home to move to safety in the pond. And employees of the refuge had nothing to protect the prized birds.

        The answer was to bed the swans down in straw in the trailer and figure out the next moves in the morning.

        Today, Mr. Bezner Kerr plans to take the swans flying around the refuge in orientation flights.

        Listening closely was Toronto filmmaker Bill Carrick, of Toronto, who drew on 30 years of training waterfowl to help prepare the trumpeter swans for the historic flight.

        It was Mr. Bezner Kerr's moment and he stood aside.

        But when asked for his appraisal, Mr. Carrick said with quiet satisfaction, “All we're trying to do is come as close as possible to what is natural.”

       

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