south before really hard weather sets in. I own I was very much surprised to hear that every spring this colony of the Mute Swan is invariably joined by some members of the Hooper, for Selby distinctly says they refuse to associate with one another.[1] This year only two Hoopers appeared, but they were remarkably fine birds. Possibly the exceptional mildness of last winter may account for the paucity of numbers, for usually the visitants come in very much stronger force. They do not, however, stay long, but within a few weeks of their arrival take their departure, and are seen no more till the following season. That the Mute Swan and the Hooper are distinct species there is no need for me to affirm here; for, not to mention the well-known difference in the colouring of their respective beaks, the difference in note,[2] but, above all, the difference in anatomical structure, more particularly as regards the trachea or windpipe, are sufficiently distinguishing characteristics.
Asked whether Lord Ilchester ever used them for the table, our informant said that about two hundred young birds were then in course of fattening. The process pursued is to take the cygnets from the nest just before they would naturally leave it; to place them in fresh-water ponds of small size, surrounded with high wattled hurdles, the ponds being so small that they have no room to take flight; to associate twenty cygnets in such a pond with one old Swan as a nurse; and to feed them with barley and barley-meal till they are ready for the table. To my enquiries whether the keeper did not often have violent altercations with the old birds while engaged in thus kidnapping the young, he said that the parents, and especially the old males, would show great fight and make desperate attempts to defend their young. They would come at him, he said, with wings and beak; but he never troubled about the beak; all he aimed at was to seize them by the wings and hold them tight, for they would otherwise strike very hard. The old popular notion that the stroke of a Swan's wing will break a man's arm is a delusion and a manifest exaggeration; but although long ago pointed out as such by Colonel Montagu, in the Supplement to his 'Ornithological Dictionary,' like most other popular sayings, it has continued to flourish to this day.
