THE BLACK SWAN

On Sunday morning Liz McQuilkin collected me and we drove up the Derwent River to Bridgewater to see the black swans. Liz is working on a poem about the black swan, part of her ekphrastic responsibilities for the reading at the Salamanca Gallery in December, and wanted to see actual birds as well as the painted one(s).

It was a gorgeous morning, sunny, and we had no trouble finding the swans. Mostly they were floating serenely towards the middle of the river, which is very wide, but we were able to find a few near shore where grass or reeds grew out into the water. In fact, we spied two elegant swan heads in the reeds not far from where we stood, presumably sitting on nests.

We watched a family of 6 fluffy grey cygnets and two parents feeding and drifting for quite a while. The adults are smaller than swans in Canada, and perhaps a little more delicate. They have a lovely curve to their necks and the feathers towards their tail seem to stick up like a series of ruffles. Black swans moult following breeding—and can’t fly for about a month—so I thought the ruffle effect might be because of the moulting. But the drawing in Simpson and Day shows the ruffle, so I guess it’s simply how their plumage sits. The backs of both the adults appeared to be more or less bare.

The young ones were fun to watch and very sweet. As the parents bent those elegant necks into the water and fed, the cygnets clustered about them, dipping their bills, perhaps scooping up food, paddling back and forth around the adults. Then they began to tip themselves up, heads under water and little blunt tails to the sky, like dabbling ducks, as they discovered things to eat.

We then drove a road that follows the river, stopping by a railway station (no trains running at the moment, Liz thought, and no passenger traffic here in any case) and were able to see a larger group of swans further from the bank, some in pairs, feeding, some just a gaggle, to adopt terminology from a cousin. While we were there a very large bird flew over and I was able to get it in my binoculars—a white-bellied sea eagle, not in full adult plumage yet.

An additional pleasure of the morning was the near-stillness of the river. Clouds and patches of blue sky were reflected in it, and occasionally the swans themselves, the double curve of their necks quite beautiful and a little surreal.

Black swans are native to Australia, but not found anywhere in Europe. In fact, they were long a metaphor there for something that didn’t exist. In current online economic conversations there are references to black swans in connection with the events of the last year. The term was defined in the Huffington Post (without citation) as “high-impact, hard-to-predict, and rare events beyond the realm of normal expectations.” So the metaphor hasn’t entirely collapsed, in spite of its inaccuracy.

I first encountered black swans about 30 years ago now, at the Kortwright Waterfowl Centre near Toronto. We were driving home after an early morning foray to the Mennonite Central Committee’s fair and quilt show in New Hamburg and stopped in to see the birds and found black swans.