8:00 AM, 37 degrees, wind SW, light. The channel is wrinkled, the sky is overcast and it is raining, the barometer predicting more of the same. What snow there was is mostly gone.
On a trip to Ashland yesterday we saw our first wild (whistling) swans of the season swimming off the outlet of Fish Creek and the large marsh just west of Ashland on Hwy 2. There were 14, six of which were juveniles, with gray plumage and flesh colored bills and feet rather than the white plumage and black bills and feet of the adults. It looks like it was a good nesting season. The adults are majestic in appearance while swimming, and comical when they “tip-up,” plunging their long necks down into the water to feed, their white rear ends bobbing in the water like giant fishing corks. I am sure they were not trumpeter swans, very rare and even larger, as there would have been a bevy of birders gawking at them through binoculars. Neither were they the European or mute swans, the adults of which have distinctive yellow bills, and they do not hold their necks as straight. We will look for wild swans on the little bays along the shore, as they should now show up in many other places as well. I can’t offer photos of these majestic birds as I don’t have the proper equipment and am not much of a photographer in any case.
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