Saw one on the way home from work today in some open water. Had a black bill thinking trumpeter swan. I usually only see one's with a orange bill. Odd to see it this time of year here -20c this morning and still 2 feet of snow not much open water around.

Nice.

I saw 2 here yesterday sitting on the frozen lake as I went by with the snow machine.

There is a lake around here that has hundreds of them on it every spring. All private property so no one has so far molested them.

I saw 3 last Monday up here Spring is coming

There was about 200 up by Wausau yesterday ago.

They're all in the cut corn fields here about two weeks

My favorite birds! The city of Lakeland Fla. keeps whites, blacks and grays in a pond. They reproduce and the wings are clipped so they can't fly away. They sell them starting at$800 per pair. So I was told by a park employee.

Well I guess the one I saw today was heading to James bay. Maybe boco can put out some corn for him he might stop by for breakfast.

Wow!

Trumpter's move into their territories early a month before the artic birds( Tundras) move north the ones that go by Boco.
They have been in Manitoba for the past 2 weeks

I have had a pair of trumpeters behind my place for almost ten years...When a biologist friend of mine mentioned she saw it and asked me to look at the bill, (which was black) I thought a wayward tundra swan which migrate through in large numbers (100's), but she said no a trumpeter...

I have a pair of trumpeters that have been nesting in a lake across the road. They are fun to listen to in the evening when they are talking. I haven't seen them this spring yet.

The Trumpeters spend the entire winters here in central MN. It can be 30 below zero and if there is a tiny bit of open water in fast flowing stream, they are on it. I honestly don't know how such a huge bird with high metabolism can find enough food under those circumstances. There are enough of them that MN has considered having a season on them.

I took these pics from my window as the lake was freezing up.




They fly over me trumpeting all winter when I am ice fishing because there is some open water on either side of the lake where creeks enter it.

We are lucky enough to have Trumpeters in decent numbers near me as well. The DNR started a program back in the 1980's, where they'd release young birds and get them to imprint on the area they were released in. It has worked in spades. We have them all over the place nowadays. I think I posted about it recently, but several years ago I had some dealings with the Kellogg Bird Sanctuary biologist, Joe Johnson, who was in charge of that program. It concerned a pair of Trumpeters I'd "discovered" while spring beaver trapping. They were banded with leg and neck bands. The one was a bird that they thought had been dead awhile, but it had been confused with a different swan that died when it hit a utility wire. A year or two after that (?) I found myself at the Kellogg facility near Battle Creek and I introduced myself to Joe Johnson.....we'd only talked via phone up until then. Old Joe gave me a real VIP tour of the Swan works. It was an honor for this fat old redneck. He has since retired and passed away, but he was a real character and I enjoyed the heck out of that day.

Both species have black bills, and on roughly 90% of adult tundra swans you may have a yellow spot near the eye.

We hunt them in the spring when they return. Good eating. Many like them dried too, they make good jerky. The eggs are awesome too.

A friend of mine had a male trumpeter swan show up in a fenced pasture he kept Australian, black swans in. It was immense, close to 5' tall. When it first showed up, it was in very bad shape. It stayed around for 4 or 5 months and became quite tame. He was kind of hoping it would breed with the black swans and then one day, it was just gone.

Keith

In this area ever body of water seems to have some on it, local farmers field where he has been spreading manure has several dozen not to mention Canada geese

When you look at the fur records it is interesting the export of dried skins to Europe. This happened just as the beaver market crashed 1830's and the mountain man has something to chase.
The HBC records are quite something. The feathers were used for ladies powder puffs for the item at the time was white faces (Talc with high arsenic content) The quills were used for pen writing. It almost eradicated the NA population. Fortunately some Alaska and interior Alberta birds survived because they overwintered in remote coastal BC waters.