When Swans Cry

A complaint of low hanging branches from a bicyclist on the public trail that cuts through our vineyard sends our grounds crew over to the swampy side of the lake. It is that corner of the lake where our resident mute swan Gina has been keeping her nest since February.

She started gathering twings for it way back in February's Full Hunger Moon. Now, on the cusp of the Full Strawberry Moon, she or her mate Guiseppe never stray from their floating twiggy throne.

The geese and the wood ducks seem to deposit eggs willy nilly: on the lawn, at the base of a dead pine tree, next to a parked automobile. But there is something about this perch in the swampy part of the lake, and the elegant creatures who tend it so carefully, that seems almost regal.

Only in recent days has Gina ventured far from the nest, looking skinny and a little desperate, plunging her muddy neck into the mire in search of victuals. Her corpulent mate Guiseppe, fat and sassy from months of chasing intruder swans and Canada geese from his terrain, takes his shift on the eggs grudgingly, though once there, he seems strangely relaxed and content.

On this morning of the low hanging branches, Guiseppe is gliding in full open waters on the distant sunny side of the lake, while Gina is just a few yards from her throne, gathering twings for her daily mending.

With a stunning randomness that brings to mind the Zapruder film and the Single Bullet Theory, by some bizarre trajectory, a rock winged by the groundskeeper's string cutter slices through a thicket of raspberry brambles, sassafras saplings, and bittersweet tangles, and somehow hits one of those carefully tended eggs, dead on.

It shatters with a devastating ping, something like a lightbulb breaking.

From yards away, Gina unleashes a lament, something that sounds exactly like crying.

Silently I have watched her glide the lake for almost a year, with intelligent avian eyes. Usually furtive, during winter's full hunger moon she seeks me out, and I begin feeding her daily, although keeping a distance, remembering always that she is a wild animal and nobody's pet, and that it is dangerous to teach a wild animal to trust a nefarious humanoid.

So it is all the more poignant to hear this mute bird emit her wail.

She power strokes to her ruined throne, and retrieves a shard of the shattered egg.

She swims it some distance from the nest and meticulously washes it, dipping it in and out of the still cool water.

Wailing still, she returns to the throne for another shard and then another, continuing the meticulous ritual until all the bits are cleansed.

Of course it is all too easy to ascribe human emotions and intentions to charismatic mega fauna, such as this pair of mute swans. I am sure there is a perfectly reasonable evolutionary explanation.

Her call is not crying, but a distress signal to her fiercely territorial mate, alerting him that an unknown predator is at large.

Her meticulous cleansing is not sorrow, but cleansing any scent that might draw the weasels and racoons and possoms who lurk in these woods, and regularly nab the less fiercely tended duck and goose eggs.

And surely the brittle shatter, and the length at which the egg had been tended but had not hatched, indicates that it was most likely not viable, a thin shelled imperfect egg from a pair of alien birds that have no business mating in Canton, Ohio.

But still on this warm sunny morning there is part of me that knows that I heard a swan cry this morning, and that something like tears must have been shed from those intelligent avian eyes.