The adventures of our swans

According to tradition Richard Lionheart, returning from a crusade, brought the first mute swans to England. Later, the Normans took them to Ireland.

Swans were sedentary and wouldn’t cross the Irish Sea, or so it was thought. Isolated for centuries on this wet, windy island at the western edge of the species natural range in the mildest climate their species encounters, our swans must have developed ‘Irish solutions to Irish problems.’ What these local peculiarities were wasn’t known and this prompted me to embark on a study of their lifestyles.

British swans are ‘stay-at-home’ birds; few of them travel much but there were a few notable exceptions. One was a bird ringed in Coventry, which turned up in Rosscarbery, Co Cork, in 1976. That raised an intriguing possibility. Mute swans, clearly, were quite capable of crossing the sea. So, did they colonise these islands on their own, without help from the Lionheart and the Normans?