Earth & Sky

The following individuals were interviewed for today’s show. Our thanks to:

Donielle Rininger
Lead Biologist
Environmental Studies at Airlie
Airlie, VA

Brooke J. Pennypacker
Pilot, UltraSwan Team Leader
Environmental Studies at Airlie
Airlie, VA

Jame G. King
U. S. Fish and Wildlife Service, retired.
Juneau, AK

Author’s notes:

Tonight the constellation Cygnus ducks down past the horizon this evening in the northwest for those in the Northern Hemisphere and rises with the morning to those in the Southern hemisphere.

Interview with Donielle Rininger:

ES: Please describe a trumpeter swan for me.

DR: The trumpeter swan is the largest North American bird. The males can weigh up to thirty pounds. They have a wingspan of up to eight feet wide. They can stand as tall as four feet. Like all swans, they have long necks and large bodies.

ES: I understand they look a lot like tundra swans. Are they facing the same kind of problems?

DR: Mostly it’s been from subsidy hunting, either for meat or for their feathers and fur, their down fur, the fashion industry. Why they were taken more than the tundra swans, they’re heavier and they’re lazier birds. They’re slow during take-off, so they make easier targets.

ES: So the Trumpeter Swan Migration Project is working to restore trumpeter swans?

DR: There are a number of groups working to bring back the trumpeter swan. Some of the things that jeopardize them now are power lines, lead poisoning, loss of habitat, and so forth. They do require a fairly large size wetland area. Generally, in the wild they’re not very personable. They like having their privacy. So they can be scared off from their breeding area very quickly if it’s not an established area. But primarily there’s one population out there that’s doing a migration. For the groups that aren’t migrating, if you have a very hard winter, you can have higher losses due to severe weather. If they can’t get any food, they can be more susceptible to predation, hunting, and poaching.

ES: What are some of the things that the Trumpeter Swan Migration Project is doing?

DR: Well, our main goal is to try and bring them back. Large waterfowl, being geese, cranes, and swans, all the youngsters learn their migration patterns from their parents. All the birds on the East Coast have been extirpated. What we hope to do is to teach these birds a migration route that they will then continue to use and be able to teach their youngsters when they become sexually mature.

ES: Where is the migration route?

DR: The one that we’ve been using from 1998-2000 is from western New York to the Chesapeake Bay. It’s about 350 miles long.

ES: Why is Migratory Bird Project getting involved in their migration?

DR: They are lazy birds, they’re very sedentary. They don’t move unless they have to. Migration takes a lot of energy. So what they do is that they wait until the very last minute, when it really looks like it’s going to freeze up and they’re not going to have any food, then they’ll go. If you ever experience the tundra swan migration, you’ll see that it’s almost like a pep rally. You can see the excitement building among the birds, and they all get into it and they all leave at once. So without having a lot of those birds that are coming down with them, that aren’t participating in this route, you really have to want to do it. That’s partly why we haven’t had the kind of results we had hoped. The last couple of years we’ve had fewer birds return on the migration routes than we had hoped. Right now we’re waiting for the winter weather in New York to freeze them out again and hope to see that they come down south again. And on this leg they’re not being led by the ultralight. They were led by the ultralight on one leg of the flight, the first flight from the northern sight to the southern sight.

ES: Could you please tell me a little about that flight?

DG: The best person to talk to is the pilot, and he’s not in the office right now. We use the ultralights because they have a nice range of speeds. So while they’re training, they’re slower while they’re training, and they’re ungainly, So you have to be able to control the flight and the plane as well. The ultralight is primarily a hanglider with an engine.

ES: How did Migratory Bird Project get started?

DG: It started out with Bill Lishman. He is an ultralight pilot and also a metal sculptor. With the resources and the experience that he had, he wanted to see if it would work with that, and it has. And we want to continue that same method. The first year we had we only had a couple of birds return. Only three birds were led south. One of them came half way back and was apprehended by a dog. It survived, but all three of the females that initiated their flight north are back to their training sights, which we consider a big success. Another one that we had, the second year of the experiment, we weren’t sure if the birds were going to leave or not. We weren’t lucky, and it was very cold. And we went up and found that they had some open water. And when we went up and actually collected them, one of our partners was concerned about their well being. One of the birds we couldn’t catch, it had no signal on its radio collar. Come to find out that the bird had left the migration on its own, and migrated south to Pennsylvania. We found where he was, he was watched all winter long, and he returned north again in the spring. So we believe the other birds that were collected would have followed that same activity if we hadn’t interrupted. Every year we learn a tremendous amount new, and we tweak the method a little bit. Trumpeter swans that we used in the first and second experiment were birds that were raised in captivity. The third year we actually collected young swans that were hatched from a nest in Alaska. And those birds performed much, much better, as far as learning to fly with the plane. And they were much healthier.

ES: What are some of the hazards these birds face along the migration routes?

DR: Well, there are a lot of things. One of the things that we’ve seen most often is that we’ve had a number of them shot by humans. They’re all during illegal hunting season, so that would be considered poaching or vandalism. High population is probably one of the main things. We have to establish a pre-selected migration route that first and foremost is safe for our pilot and our plane. That may not be what the birds would prefer or choose on their own. When they return on their own on subsequent flights, they don’t stick to the path that we taught them. They find better habitats that they can find without the plane. Power lines are a big problem. Cell towers, although we don’t have any evidence of swans having conflicts with cell towers, we do know that they cause a lot of mortality in birds in general. So there are a large clash of people with the natural world, and we try to do what we can to accommodate both.

ES: Could you tell me a little more detail about the work that the Trumpeter Swan Migration Project does with trumpeter swans?

DG: The first two years we actually hatch the birds and imprint them on our biologists. We work with the birds and get them conditioned to being around the plane and flying with the plane. And actually it can be anything from playing a tape recorder of the ultralight engine to the birds before they even hatch, conditioning them. It’s like a reward system where they eat while the listen to the ultralight, so that they realize something good happens when they’re with the handler and when they’re with the sound of the ultralight. Then we start working that up. We start exercising them, again with the plane, we integrate the plane into it. And as Fall approaches, it’s a matter of exercising them, building up their stamina, short flights, enlarging the diameter around the area. We know that these birds have the ability to return to where they were taught to fly. We’ve even hatched birds in Virginia, took them to New York before they could fly, and New York is where they return, because that’s where they learned to fly. For the migration, we leave the birds behind the ultralight. They stay out overnight in a pen on the runway and see the stars. There’s evidence also that birds navigate by stars. They stay on throughout the winter. Then in the spring, we make observations. We watch to see that they initiate a return migration and follow them that way. All of the birds have radio telemetry on. Some of them have satellite transmitters, and others have conventional transmitters, which we can listen to and follow, where they are. And again the whole hope is that these birds will learn the route and repeat it well enough and of course survive all their troubles, and power lines, and getting too close to people and dogs and so forth. And [the hope is that they survive long enough to find a mate and successfully reproduce and teach their youngsters.

“”“”“”“”“”“” Interview with Brooke Pennepacker “”“”“”“”“”“”

ES:

BP: Well, we do a number of things. The project I’m working on is the trumpeter swan migration project. But that’s just one of the projects we do here. We have a swan research program. Basically we research swans, study swan behavior, and how they adapt to their environment, and so forth. And we have graduate students who come out from the local colleges. They use this facility for their graduate paperwork. And then we also have education programs where we bring kids out and show them the environment, the flora and fauna of the area, basically expose them to nature.

ES:

BP: Well, the swan project was originally based originally on some work done by Canadian sculptor Bill Lishman, using geese to fly with ultralights, and then using that technique in the hopes of using that ultralights to lead birds on a migratory pattern which they’ve lost when their parents were killed, and to bring back some birds that no longer migrate like whooping cranes and trumpeter swans and there are some other birds like that. That’s how we got started in it. Originally he and our director, Dr. William Sladen, got together and started using geese surrogates try this out, this technique which was made famous in the movie “Fly Away Home” which you may have seen some years back. Bill Lishman and his group then went off to cranes, and then we went off to do swans. Swans have always been a big interest to our director, Bill Sladen. And we have a swan collection here, so we have were interested in whether this technique would be applicable to basically restoring the trumpeter swan population, which had been killed out 200 years ago in the East Coast of the United States. So that’s basically what we’ve been doing with our project.

ES:

BP: Well, it’s going pretty well. We started doing swans back in 1997. And I think that the first migrations in 1997 we’ve tried, and this past year was our third experiment migrating swans behind the ultralight. And we had a mixed bag of failure and success. We’ve had tremendous success in refining the technique, in trying to understand the birds and in trying to put our blueprint on their blueprint to get them to follow the ultralight and follow us on the migration route. We’ve had more trouble trying to get them to go back to repeat the return trip on their own. There’s a number of reasons we think that caused that problem. But basically we’re still in the experimental stage. Each of these projects is basically an experiment to see just how far we can go with the technique.

ES:

BP: Well the problem is that they’re shown the migratory route by their parents. And unless they’re shown the route they don’t do it. So once their parents were killed a couple of hundred years ago, well there wasn’t anyone around to show them the route from north to south. What we’re trying to do is use the ultralights basically as surrogate parents, to lead them on a prescribed route, away from urban areas and congested airports and so forth on the route, and also to keep them away from areas with high lead contamination from hunting and so forth and teach them a migratory route that will be safe for them to repeat, and then hopefully continue year after year. But the problem originally was that they didn’t have anyone showing them this route, their parents had been killed and the tradition had been lost. All the trumpeters on the East Coast had been killed a couple of hundred years ago by the early settlers. Now there are populations of trumpeters in the Mid-west and Alaska, actually our last group of birds went to Alaska. We took them out of the wild. But in 1917 for example there were only 69 trumpeter swans left in the continental U.S. During World War II, when they started building roads in Alaska, they found another population there, and since then they’ve been protected. But what we’re trying to do us bring them back to the East Coast.

ES:

BP: Well we’ve done three experiments, and in the first experiments we hatched them from eggs. So they were pretty young when we got them, in fact they were brand new. And we continued the training process from there. This last experiment we took them out of the wild after they’d been hatched by their parents and spent 10-14 days with their parents in the wild. Then we took them out, hoping to get some good results that we weren’t able to get with the others. And by that I mean the birds would be more wild after they grew up. They would follow the ultralight better because they were used to following their parents. And they would be healthier. And actually that’s what happened. We had very, very good health with these birds from Alaska. And they followed the ultralight very well. So as we’re zeroing in on this technique and refining it, that’s one of the strides we’ve made this past year.

ES:

BP: Yeah, the first two years we incubated them and hatched them and imprinted them in the pilots and the handlers. As I said this last year was a bit of a deviation from that where we went into the wild and got them after they had already hatched and had been semi trained by their parents.

ES:

BP: This last experiment was sixteen birds. They’re actually quite a fun bird to work with. We try to keep it on a scientific level but you can’t help but fall in love with these birds, they’re the largest migratory bird in North America. So they’ve got a wingspan of eight feet and they get up to as high as thirty pounds. So they’re a lot of bird. Now to get these birds to fly behind an ultralight is difficult because, number one , it’s certainly unnatural for them. And also they’re so big and heavy that it’s a great effort for them to fly in the first place, and an even greater effort to follow an ultralight, with all its noise and craziness. Basically our training plan is to habituate them to the ultralight. And then we try and replicate as much as possible the training that their parents do in the wild, habituate them to the ultralight to where they’ll follow it. That takes quite a while and it’s a lot of effort involved.

ES: How do you get the swans to accept instructions from humans?

BP: Basically we start pretty early. When we did the hatching experiment they immediately imprinted on the handlers, the pilots. This last experiment we took them out of the wild so we didn’t have that opportunity. But what we did do is basically use training techniques that are used in training dogs and other animals, and we applied them to the swan. So we basically took advantage of their needs, which are basically very simple. You know, at that point they want security, and they want food, and those two things are the tools that we use basically to train them. What we’ll do is first get them to follow a person dressed up in a uniform. The uniform is the pilot’s uniform. And the handler in the uniform will carry a food bowl. And so they’ll follow in order to get fed. And then we build on that. We first lead them behind the boat, and get them to follow a row boat. And then get them to follow an ultralight without the wing on it and get used to the noise. And then we’ll take them when they fledge and get ready to fly. We’ll fly them behind the ultralight itself. Now we also, when we’re leading them with the food bowl, we’re also playing a tape of the ultralight engine with a big boombox around our shoulders. So they’re getting used to the noise of the ultralight. At the same time they’re associating with food. And we also make sure that when they’re with the handler good things happen to them. In other words,they get food, they get security, any dogs, anything else that gets in the area is chased away. And so they feel secure with the pilot and the handler dressed like a pilot. And then we just sort of transfer that all the way up to the various steps of training until they’ll follow the ultralight.

ES:

BP: Like I said, this is the third experiment, so we’ve had three migrations with them of various distances. Every bird is an individual. And every bird flies a little bit differently. But the idea is to get them to follow the ultralight. Once you do that, they’ll follow you just about anywhere. And that’s the goal of the training regiment, to get them to follow. Once they follow, we lead them on the migration and lead them on the migration route that we prescribe, avoiding the heavily populated areas, high traffic zones for aircraft, and the heavy lead content areas.

ES:

BP: Well our last migration was about 340 miles. And it was from upstate New York, between Buffalo and Rochester down to the Chesapeake Bay.

ES:

BP: Oh, it really is, yeah. It’s quite a privilege. As one would expect it’s a great experience which is quite dramatic and profound. Actually most of the time it’s a lot of hard work. In the beginning, particularly in the training, in the early training, it’s probably more akin to a W.W.II dog-fight than it is a “Fly Away Home” with the music playing in the background. Because you’re trying to get these birds to fly with you. You’re trying to show them that they’ll be safe if they do it. And you’re trying to show them the benefits of flying with the ultralight, one of the large benefits is that there’s a low pressure area off the wing tip and that they’ll have to exert less effort if they maintain that position on the ultralight. And so you have to keep that wing in their face in the early stages, particularly to show them the advantage. Once they see that, they’re more likely to stay. But of course, they have minds of their own, and the idea is to stay with them, which can be quite tiring in the beginning. And then as their training regimen goes on and they get the idea, it becomes more and more pleasurable. There aren’t too many times where you hear the music playing, and it’s wonderful. Most of the time it’s pretty hard work. But there are times, especially right at the end, where you do have little moments where you can sit back and look at them, and they’re looking at you, and it’s quite exciting. It’s really a privilege to be up there with them.

ES:

BP: Well we have a goal of having them fly with us for at least an hour. One of the things is not just getting them to fly with the ultralight, but to build up their stamina, their fat stores and so forth, where they could actually make a migration. They could stay aloft for a certain period of time and successfully get over mountains and so forth. We shoot for an hour. When they can fly for an hour then we’re pretty much ready to go.

ES:

BP: Well right now we’re monitoring the birds that we did in this past project. They’re up in New York in Oak Orchard Wildlife Refuge, right near where they learned to fly. And we’re monitoring them and hope that they’ll come back to Chesapeake Bay when there’s a freeze-up in this winter. So we’re going to see what they do and base our future plans on that.

ES:

BP: Well, all I’d like to say Is that these birds represent more than just trumpeter swans. They represent a bigger picture. There’s a picture that I hope our birds will represent, and that is that the natural resources of this country are diminishing greatly as the population increases, and as pollution and industry and so forth takes over. This just makes people a little more aware that there is a natural world out there, and we need to protect it. We need to be concerned about it. And hopefully it will generate some interest in that regard.
We are a non-profit, a division of International Academy of Preventative Medicine. They are they people that make us able to do what we do here.

^^^^^^^^^^^ Jim King ^^^^^^^^^^^^

The reason that trumpeters weren’t really understood very well is because they disperse so widely. You never see more than one pair nesting in a medium size lake. Occasionally on the great big lakes they’ll be more than one nesting pair, but they tend to be more than a mile apart. There wasn’t any way, until airplanes came along, to really get a sense of how many there were. And by then, the public was getting more concerned (this was in the 50s and early 60s) about endangered birds. The trumpeter swan was a really rare bird. Well, there was some excitement about having some in Alaska. And , I think it was in 1956 that we did a count and there was over a thousand trumpeters?And in 1968 we did have inch-to-the?mile maps for most areas. And in that year I organized a count that a lot of people participated in. And in 1968 there 2847 trumpeters in Alaska. There were probably a few we missed. And this caused some excitement because this suggested that the population was not in danger of immediate extinction. And that number, there were also about a thousand outside of Alaska, was enough so that they were taken off the endangered status that they’d had initially. And the reason for that was not because they were so abundant, but because it made it easier for people with the proper facilities to raise them. But the need to keep track of them was recognized, and the decision was made to try and get a census in Alaska every five years. In the year 2000 they had shown an increase to a little over 17,000. Three of those counts I organized, and I’ve participated in all of the ones since, as an observer mostly?

Most of the trumpeters winter in farmland areas, in British Columbia and Washington? The Rock Mountain ones and the interior ones are a little more worrisome because they have not learned to winter in farmlands, and they have some problems getting through the winter.