Patty lived a quiet life in Columbia, with the kind of mate expected of her and a family that grew bigger by the year.
Her swan song was something else.
She died in the throes of rebellious love and violence, leaving a criminal court case and a first in the annals of ornithology rippling in her wake.
Patty was a trumpling swan, cut down in the late spring by a BB gun on Lake Elkhorn.
This was no ordinary encounter between bird and BB because Patty was no ordinary swan. At 19, she was a veteran in a famed wildlife researcher's effort to reintroduce native swan species to Maryland.
Yet Patty's most important legacy flows from something that Dr. William Sladen of central Virginia's Airlie Center never planned or expected: her spring fling with a mute swan.
The pair's offspring -- plucked as baseball-sized eggs from the nest the felled swan could no longer warm, stashed into a chest packed with warm water bottles and dried corn for cushioning, then hatched in an incubator at the Airlie Center preserve -- will make swan history, Sladen said.
"The offspring that we're raising are completely new to science. Nobody has ever seen a mutling before," he said, coining the term for a cross between mute and trumpling swans.
The trumpling itself is a mix of trumpeter and whistling swans. As far as scientists know, trumplings live only in captivity and had never before mated with a mute, said Donielle Rininger, lead biologist at the Airlie Center, home to several swan research projects.
Patty left seven eggs. Six hatched. Five cygnets survive.
Sladen and other scientists are anxiously waiting to see what the mute-trumpling offspring -- four with gray down, one creamy white -- will be when they grow up.
Will they resemble their mute swan father, curving their necks into a graceful "s" when they swim, arching their wings up high in aggression, and making only a few hissing and grunting sounds?
Or will they hold their heads up straight, flutter their wings sideways and produce the distinctive trumpeting calls found on their mother's side of the family?
"We're looking after them very carefully to see what they turn out to be," said Sladen, a retired Johns Hopkins University professor. "It's quite an exciting thing."
Patty herself turned out to be something rather unexpected. Even friends mourning the swan's death do not mince words.
