In conclusion
Nutria are unsightly South American swamp rats that California has attempted to exterminate. It might be more difficult to convince people to shoot damaging nonnative mute swans.
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The first pair of enormous white swans with black and orange beak and elegant, curved necks were quickly spotted swimming in the marsh beside a levee road in Solano County on an early August morning.
They explored the Grizzly Island Wildlife Area while a pickup truck passed by. Two more swans emerged in the marsh beside the dirt road a short drive later, past a herd of a dozen tule elk. Then four more. Dozens of swans swam in the water a few hundred yards down the road, far away, past a tangle of swaying reeds.
The sight of all these magnificent creatures may be enjoyable to casual bird watchers and may remind readers of books with swan themes, including Leda and the Swan and The Ugly Duckling.
The birds, however, pose the most recent and rapidly increasing threat to California’s few surviving wetlands, according to wetland biologists and others interested in the wellbeing of the nearby Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta, the largest estuary on the West Coast.
These mute swans are indigenous to Asia and Europe. They are the largest bird in the marsh, weighing up to 30 pounds and having a wingspan of up to eight feet. They are not at all afraid to throw their weight around.
They have murdered at least one American kayaker and are fiercely territorial, especially during breeding season. They have also been known to drown smaller animals. In other areas of the United States, they have invaded and displaced native bird colonies that were nesting. The plant life that other native wetland species rely on is destroyed by mute swans, who also consume an excessive amount of submerged flora.
According to Brad Bortner, a retired chief of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s migratory bird management programs in Washington, D.C., they may be charming and a large, attractive white bird, but they can also be rather cruel.
In 2008, California outlawed the importation of mute swans into the state and prohibited anybody without a special permit from keeping them as pets. The goal was to prevent the state from being home to yet another damaging invading species.
It was unsuccessful. In a matter of years, the number of mute swans skyrocketed. According to state waterfowl biologists, there were 1,150 of them in 2022.They projected over 12,000 this spring, almost twice as many as the previous year. The Suisun Marsh, a vast network of public wetlands, agricultural land, and private duck-hunting clubs on the outskirts of the Bay Area close to Fairfield, is home to the majority of the mute swans.
The California Department of Fish and Wildlife’s waterfowl coordinator, Melanie Weaver, stated, “We keep watching them climb and climb and climb.”
In an effort to reduce the swan population to more manageable levels in the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta and elsewhere, a bill that is currently before the state Legislature would permit hunters and landowners to shoot the swans for the next five years.
The hunting organizations backing Assembly Bill 764 essentially ask: Why not allow hunters and landowners to kill mute swans for free if Californians are willing to spend over $13 million since 2018 to eradicate nearly 6,000 nutria, the 20-pound, orange-toothed South American rodents that have infiltrated the same waterways?
Mark Hennelly, a lobbyist for the California Waterfowl Association, warned the Assembly Water, Parks, and Wildlife Committee this spring that if the population grows too big and unmanageable, it might be impossible to manage them properly. Therefore, we wish to prevent the issue.
Animal welfare groups object
Despite California’s fervent and powerful anti-hunting advocates, the argument has thus far been remarkably easy to sell in the Legislature. Proposals to shoot swans have sparked demonstrations in other places.
Without a single legislator voting against it, the bill cleared the Assembly with ease. The California Senate is now considering it.
According to the CalMattersDigital Democracy database, no group has yet to oppose the proposal, although that might soon change.
Unlike nutria, mute swans have a devoted following, primarily on the East Coast.
Friends of Animals spokesman Nicole Rivard stated that she and other members of the animal advocacy group do not think mute swans should be treated like rodents.
She stated the birds didn’t deserve to be murdered because they were brought here by people and didn’t cause their own arrival.
According to Rivard, hunters seeking a reason to lawfully shoot another bird are the driving force behind the California proposal. According to state legislation, landowners are currently only permitted to kill mute swans if they are shown to be harming property or growing crops.
“We don’t like the idea that (hunting) might be, you know, part of the reasoning behind this because we’re anti-hunting,” Rivard said.
Friends of Animals and other organizations rejected the extermination of mute swans decades ago after Mid-Atlantic states advocated it when their populations started to grow significantly in the 1990s and early 2000s, claiming that accusations of violence and environmental harm were exaggerated.
To try to halt the killing, the organizations staged protests, brought legal action, and suggested legislation. Their success was not quite consistent. In response to protests from animal welfare organizations, some jurisdictions started slaughtering non-native swans. Notably, by 2010, Maryland has reduced the number of mute swans from about 5,000 in the early 2000s to about 200.
Josh Homyack, the Maryland Department of Natural Resources’ game bird section leader, stated that the number has been lowered to a small number of birds today due to ongoing control and maintenance efforts.
In meticulously planned operations, government agency staff in Maryland attacked mute swan nests, destroyed eggs, grabbed and put down swans that were unable to fly during their feather-molting season, and shot them, according to Homyack. Additionally, the state granted local landowners a few permits to kill the birds.
The mute swan lobby in New York succeeded in passing a bill that made it more difficult to kill the birds. Before removing the birds lethally, state officials must completely exhaust non-lethal control methods like destroying their nests and catching them and relocating them to wildlife facilities.
New York’s mute swan population has remained stable at between 2,000 and 3,400 birds.
Charisma matters with invasive species
Since before the turn of the century, mute swans have existed on the East Coast. They were initially brought in as showy animals for parks, zoos, and homes.
This is probably how some of California’s silent swans arrived. Others were probably introduced in recent years to drive out Canada geese, which have becoming more and more of a problem at parks and golf courses, according to Weaver, the California waterfowl coordinator.
According to her, people were purchasing these (swans) and simply discarding them.
Weaver observed that instead of clipping their wings to prevent them from taking flight, their owners failed to take the required action. It’s hardly shocking. It s no easy task to grab a hissing 25-pound swan, big and angry enough to swamp a kayaker. The birds flew to adjacent marshes and started breeding because there was nothing to stop them.
Here we are, not very many years down the road, with a population that is really increasing at a rapid rate, Weaver said.
So far, California s wildlife agency hasn t enacted a mute swan eradication plan similar to the one it started almost immediately and publicly promoted a few years ago, after nutria first started turning up in the San Joaquin Valley.
Nutria are similarly destructive feeders on aquatic plants. The South American swamp rodents also burrow holes in levees, posing a threat to the state s flood-control and water-supply infrastructure.
Dave Strayer, a retired invasive species expert with theCary Institute of Ecosystem Studiesin New York, said he s not surprised state officials haven t been as aggressive with the beautiful mute swans, given the uproar over killing them in other states.
He said research has shown that when it comes to invasive animals,charisma matters. The more attractive a problematic non-native species is, the less appetite there is to wipe it out.
Stayer gave an example: Few complain about killing common nonnative rats, but you re apt to get death threats at even the suggestion of wiping outecologically harmfulferal cat colonies in the same habitats.
He noted that no one has ever complained about efforts to eradicate one of his research subjects, thenonnative zebra musselsthathave also invaded California.
I never had even one person stand up for zebra mussels and say, No, these are beautiful, elegant God s creatures and so forth, he said.
Few wetlands and too many mute swans
Supporters of the swan-killing legislation say reducing the number of mute swans should be fairly easy since the giant white birds are easy to spot, identify and kill. Their size and the color and shape of their bills also reduce the risk they ll be confused with other protected bird species, they say.
California s native tundra and trumpeter swans would still be protected and illegal to shoot if the bill becomes law.
Despite their undeniable beauty, Weaver, the state waterfowl coordinator, sees mute swans similarly to nutria.
The swans pose too great a threat to native species reliant on the few wetlands left in California, which has lost at least 90% of the habitats to agriculture and urban sprawl.
They don t move around the state all that much, and they really like the Delta-Suisun Marsh area, so it s still easy to handle the issue, Weaver said. The longer we wait, it won t be.
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