Assunpink WMA 12/25--Trumpeter Swans

A very cold Christmas morning found us traveling up to Assunpink to see if we could locate the Trumpeter Swans that have been reported there for the last couple of weeks. We found them immediately from the boat launch parking lot, 3 large "dirty" swans, with straight necks and a wedge-shaped head. I was only able to make some deplorable digiscope photos--just good enough to prove we saw them.

Mostly all 3 had their heads underwater, so I was lucky to get anything more than 3 white lumps floating in the  lake.

Trumpeter Swans, the largest swans in North America and, on average, the largest waterfowl on earth, are western birds, so counting them in New Jersey is, for reasons I don't either fully understand or agree with, debatable. The birds were almost extirpated in the west by hunting but are making a comeback and are now rather common in the mountain states and farther west. In the mid-west and I believe upstate New York, there are a number of programs to re-establish the species, though in New York it would be more like introducing the species since it was never a resident that far to the northeast. And there's part of the controversy, I suppose: when is an "introduced" species countable. The rule of thumb is when they start to have a sustainable breeding population in the wild. No one knows where these birds came from (they're immature birds, by the way), but a good guess would be from Northern NJ where, from what I've read, there have been Trumpeter Swans in the Great Swamp around Bernardsville for quite a while. So it would be nothing for these big birds to make the flight south to Assunpink.

They were certainly countable in Ohio when we were there in the spring. Their re-introduction or introduction (whichever it is) has gone just fine there. I only wish these birds were calling; as I think I wrote in May, you get a good idea of where they got their name when you  hear them. They sound like a bad high school band warming up.

Eventually some Rare Bird Committee will get around to determining if these birds are "good" for NJ, but I don't care, I'm not in any competitions, so I'm counting them as my 298th NJ species.

We didn't spend a lot of time looking for other birds, due to the frosty weather. What we did see on the lake and driving back down the road:
12 species
Canada Goose  100
Trumpeter Swan  3   
Lesser Scaup  4    No spur on flanks
Ruddy Duck  1
Great Blue Heron  2
Turkey Vulture  1
Mourning Dove  3
Downy Woodpecker  1
Blue Jay  1
American Robin  1
Song Sparrow  1
White-throated Sparrow  2