Friday, May 07, 1999
Swan finds way home from Indiana
BY BEN L. KAUFMAN
The Cincinnati Enquirer
One of four rare trumpeter swans that wintered in Indiana's Muscatatuck National Wildlife Refuge has returned to its northern Ontario training ground.
“It's very exciting,” Wayne Bezner Kerr confirmed Thursday.
Leader of the team trying to teach traditional migration routes, he said one female flew “right back to the spot where the training pens were” near Sudbury in northern Ontario.
A colleague got close enough to read the swan's leg band and confirm it was one of the Muscatatuck Four, Mr. Bezner Kerr said.
“It's good news for everybody,” refuge biologist and winter host Mike Oliver added from Seymour, Ind.
Mr. Bezner Kerr, in Guelph, Ontario, also has a reliable but unconfirmed report that the three remaining swans were spotted near Sudbury.
It was the best news since the trumpeters left Muscatatuck in late February or early March.
Mr. Bezner Kerr and his wife, Rachel, began their trumpeter project as part of a larger effort to reintroduce the huge birds to the eastern half of North America where they were hunted to extinction in the 19th century.
(Trumpeters are the 747s of the waterbird world, four times the size of the more common Canada goose.)
The couple and their allies used different methods to raise newborn cygnets in southern Ontario. They hoped to learn which approach produced trumpeters most willing to be taught to follow an ultralight aircraft.
Next, they took 3-month-old swans about 300 miles north to Sudbury for training.
Finally, Mr. Bezner Kerr used his ultralight to lead the strongest quartet to Muscata tuck, a suitable wintering venue, in December.
Their arrival just before Christmas made the experiment a success and gave Mr. Bezner Kerr all he needed to finish his master's degree at Guelph University.
It would be a bonus if any of the trumpeters flew back to Sudbury, and the female's return proved that historic migration routes could be taught by humans, Mr. Bezner Kerr said. “We're not guessing now.”
Moreover, the round trip suggests returning swans might breed and restore the natural cycle.
“We're now in a position to right some serious wrongs,” Mr. Bezner Kerr said.
Finally, he said, the return is “the first evidence” that swans learn routes from terrain over which they fly.
An alternative theory says swans watch the night sky from birth and learn a “fix” from the stars.
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