Bel Air. -- There comes a moment when a serious environmentalist has to suck it up and kill something.
In England all mute swans belong to the queen, and anyone harming one is liable to penalty. Despite our unseemly fascination with the common behavior of the royal family, we are no longer a crown colony, so nothing except public opinion stands in the way of disposing of the mute swans that have
populated the Chesapeake Bay. Public opinion mistakenly favors the swans, which are large, graceful, white birds that catch and hold the eye.
Maryland's most obvious pair of mute swans spends most of the year in the small pond at the east end of the Bay Bridge, where they serve as nature's billboard, the first tangible proof that one is on the Eastern Shore. If they were the only pair nesting in Maryland it would not matter, but they are part of a much larger problem, one it is time to do something about.
There are currently about 800 pairs of mute swans nesting along the shores of the Chesapeake Bay and its tributaries, the bulk of the population between Dorchester and Kent counties. The numbers have been expanding steadily and inexorably since March of 1962, when, during a storm, five birds escaped from estates on Kent Island.
One pair bred successfully that summer, and by 1980 there were about 400 pairs. Recently mute swans have spread to several locations on the Western Shore and up the Potomac River, and there is no reason to assume the expansion will stop until they have colonized all the suitable habitat in tidewater Maryland. The queen's subjects have always been good at colonizing.
Most people consider the addition of so lovely a bird to the local landscape a good idea. They are wrong. Mute swans, native to the Far East and brought to these shores by way of Europe, are destructive to the habitats of the Chesapeake Bay and to native waterfowl.
Mute swans abuse the hospitality of the Bay in two ways. The first has to do with their eating habits. Mute swans feed primarily on the seeds of underwater grasses. Submerged aquatic vegetation has been closely linked to the health of the Chesapeake Bay. Their disappearance from large portions of the Bay has been implicated in the declines not only in wintering waterfowl, but of the crab and shellfish that at one time made the Bay synonymous with the seafood industry. Unlike most native waterfowl, which nip the seeds from the plants, mute swans rip the plants out by the roots. Because they are large birds, with large appetites, they can strip the submerged aquatic vegetation from large areas of shallow water, making the habitat unsuitable for crabs, fish and other waterfowl.
