Jim McFadden was 79 years old when he strangled the swan.
It was self-defense, he says.
The retired salesman and his best hounds were hunting raccoons near his Kent County home, closing in on their quarry, when the swan charged out of the high grass.
"Its mouth was open and its wings were flapping and it came right at me," said McFadden, now 84. "Then two or three other swans went after the dogs and scared the hell out of them."
Della Shanahan has developed an entirely different relationship with the mute swans nesting near her Pasadena home. She's a caregiver.
Shanahan began feeding her first pair of swans in 1994, during a winter so severe that much of the Patapsco River and the ponds that make up their habitat froze.
"I was up three or four times a night making sure they were OK," said Shanahan, 65. "My husband thought I was nuts."
Shanahan and McFadden represent two sides of a raging debate that demonstrates the difficulty of controlling a species - even one labeled a nuisance - if it wins the attention of organized animal lovers.
Mute swans, distinguishable from six other swan species by their orange bills, were first imported from Europe and Asia in the 19th century to decorate parks, zoos and private land. Experts say Maryland's 3,600 mute swans are descended from five birds that escaped from a Talbot County estate in 1962.
The state's plan to shoot up to 1,500 of those birds, announced this spring, prompted a petition drive, two lawsuits and a federal review of swan management policies. As a result, game wardens wonder if there is any politically acceptable way to reduce a bird population that is mushrooming out of control.
State wildlife biologists call the swans an invasive, aggressive species that crowds out native waterfowl and damages the habitat by eating 10 million pounds of aquatic grass annually - food critical for crabs and other wildlife. They say the swans should be treated no differently from other invaders whose populations are kept in check by eradication efforts.
On the other side of the argument are fans of the majestic birds who say the swans are as much a part of their habitat as the people who would shoot them - and just as entitled to live their lives in peace.
"If they're invasive, so are we," said Shanahan.
The pro-swan campaign began in April, when the Maryland Department of Natural Resources announced its shooting plans after years of trying a less-dramatic measure, spreading food oil on the swans' eggs to keep them from hatching.
Wildlife officers killed about 100 birds before the first lawsuit was filed in Washington by an animal protection group and three Eastern Shore residents. A few days later, the DNR agreed to stop the shooting and surrender its federal permit until the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service could review its policies.
Another lawsuit, filed by a Connecticut-based advocacy group, alleges that the federal agency violated environmental laws by granting blanket swan-shooting approval to Maryland and dozens of states, mostly in the Northeast and Upper Midwest. As a result of that lawsuit, Fish and Wildlife officials are reviewing those permits.
One of those states was Michigan, which planned to allow hunters to shoot up to 25 mute swans on two lakes in the Ottawa Indian reservation about 300 miles north of Chicago.
Mark Knee, a wildlife biologist for the Little River Band of the Ottawa Indians, complained that Michigan's mute swan population swelled to 4,000 before state officials finally decided to act. In addition to devouring aquatic grasses, he said, the swans are eating wild rice, which is becoming a cash crop.
The lawsuits have put Michigan's plans on hold.
"We're just in a wait-and-see attitude right now," he said.
Maryland wildlife biologists say that many of the swans' defenders are swayed by the birds' beauty. No one, they noted, has protested efforts to kill off less-attractive invaders such as the nutria, a web-footed rodent that infests Eastern Shore waters, and the northern snakehead, a voracious predatory fish that infiltrated three Crofton ponds.
"Thank God, the snakehead didn't have this kind of advocacy going for it or we'd be completely losing our fisheries," said Jonathan McKnight, associate director of habitat conservation for the Department of Natural Resources' Wildlife and Heritage Service.
For many longtime Eastern Shore residents such as McFadden, the state's effort to reduce the swan population makes sense. Although he no longer hunts raccoons, it would certainly lessen the chance of incidents like the one four years ago, when he wound up wringing the neck of the swan that rushed him.
He hasn't killed a swan since, and he said he realizes that he probably provoked that one by coming too close to its nest. Even so, he said he never much liked the birds. That much was evident last week when he took a visitor on a tour of the woods and farms in Kent County, where he has lived since 1946.
