I
N ROYAL
SUCCESSION , Sidney, the mute swan Cygnus olor, has died, and four
trumpeter swans, Olor buccinator, have taken his place on the Campus
Pond.
Old and new could not be more different.
Sidney was demure, beautiful, and a deceiver. He curved his neck in an S-shape suggesting graceful submissiveness as he glided across the pond. In fact he had the temper of a prima donna haughty, capricious, and on occasion, vile.
The trumpeters, while self-confident, are homey and forthright. They carry themselves nearly erect on the water, bowing only to feed or court. They mingle with other birds, though they refuse to be crowded. So far they have let a few Canada geese share the Ppond: only a few, no more.
Sidney came from a cosseted race. Cygnus olor has been semidomesticated for centuries. In England, where mute swans were protected by royal decree, records of their privileged life go back a thousand years. Their numbers have thus been comparatively large for a bird so attractive and so big. The pampered Sidney, true scion of his species, was on seasonal display only. He spent the winter in a warm campus barn, where he eventually died, attempting to peck the hands that fed him.
Trumpeters, though hardy natives of the north, have had a much tougher time of it. There were hundreds of thousands of them in what is now Canada and the northern U.S. when firearms arrived on the continent. But their very size at maturity males can weigh more than thirty-five pounds, and have a wingspan of seven or eight feet together with their valuable skin, feathers, and meat, made them easy and desirable targets. Their habitats were systematically altered by human settlement. The trumpeter was nearly extinct just a few decades ago. Their preservation and recent dramatic growth in numbers is one of the most remarkable success stories of the environmental movement.
And so trumpeters as a species are not new or exotic to Amherst, but old grads returning to a former home. And they will be on duty right through the winter, gathered on the patch of water that remains unfrozen at the south end of the pond.
But it is sound and sex, even more than deportment, that will mark the greatest differences between ancien and nouvelle regimes. Sidney barely spoke and when he did, he squawked, hissed, barked, or on occasion trilled. As for the trumpeters, their name tells it all. Buccinator is Latin for the fellow who blows on a bucina a war horn, like in an old Cecil B. DeMille movie and when he blows, his buccal (cheek) muscles pop out, just like Dizzy Gillespie's. Trumpeters do not honk, squawk, or cackle. They `sound,' in sonorous tones reminiscent of a bassoon. The windpipe of a trumpeter can be five feet or longer, doubling back on itself inside the bird's breast, folding over a bony partition that acts as a sounding board.
As for the swans' sex lives, Sidney, of course, had none. He was a bachelor and had no playmates, which may account for his bad temper. The campus was thus denied the sight of the nuptial dance of the mute swan.
The sexes of the UMass trumpeters have not yet been positively determined. "We wanted them to adjust to the new environment without too much poking around," explains Marc Fournier, head of campus grounds and the swans' patron. Fournier is fairly certain, however, that at least one mating couple will be found among the four.
Thus a visit to the pond during spring mating season may provide a chance to view a remarkable ritual. Unlike the rest of us, trumpeters are less unusual in courting and consummation than in what they do afterwards. They do not slip away on separate paths, or doze, or chat idly. Instead, trumpeters engage in a loving postlude, a dance on the waters accompanied by their own horn duet. They rise and call; swim together in a series of intimate circles on the water, and finally join in a nice, friendly bath.
The trumpeter quartet is likely, as time goes by, to come to symbolize UMass, even as did Sidney in countless representations of the campus. Yet the old swan lives on. He appeared, for instance, months after his death, on the cover of the fall catalog of the Division of Continuing Education. He lingers in adoring color photographs along scores of campus corridors. He is still to be found occasionally, and appropriately, adorning the campus website.
There may be poetic justice in these afterlife appearances. The swan is preeminently the bird of poetry, and now, after a troubled life, Sidney has been transmuted into pure symbol. As Edmund Spenser wrote in the sixteenth century, after the death of another poetic swan, our bird has "to highest heaven mounted / where now he is become a heavenly sign" not in the form of a constellation, but as an icon upon the ethereal waves of www.umass.edu.
Meanwhile, here below, let trumpets sound for the trumpeters, heralds of a new millennium on the University of Massachusetts campus.
