Description

Tundra Swan].
Plate 409. Heritage.
The two types of swans depicted by Audubon, this one and the Trumpeter Swan (see numbers 11 and 16), are native species. The Mute Swans of the Swan Pond (established in the early 1950s), are not native, and consequently were never painted by Audubon. For an 1860s European rendition of Mute Swans, see number 100, by Joseph Wolf for John Gould.
Native to Europe, Mute Swans have been declared an invasive species by the State of New York. Recently, to exempt Manny and Faye from deportation, the Village made an agreement with the state to send the Swans’annual offspring to Great Britain or Continental Europe every fall. This allows the confined and carefully supervised parents and their namesakes to remain at the Swan Pond, thereby ensuring the continuation of this popular Village attraction and symbol.
Regarding the Trumpeter Swan, Audubon quotes his friend Dr. Sharpless of Philadelphia, who is familiar with them in Chesapeake Bay: “About the first of September, the Swans leave the shores of the Polar Sea, according to FRANKLIN, and resort to the lakes and rivers in about the latitude of Hudson’s Bay (60 degrees), where they remain preparing for a departure for the winter until October, when they collect in flocks of twenty or thirty, and seizing favourable weather, with the wind not opposed to the direction of their flight, they mount high in the air, form a prolonged wedge, and with loud screams depart for more genial climes. When making either their semi-annual migration, or on shorter expeditions, an occasional scream equal to “how do you all come on behind?” issues from the leader, which is almost immediately replied to by some posterior Swan with an “all’s well” vociferation. When the leader of the party becomes fatigued with his extra duty of cutting the air, he falls in the rear, and his neighbour takes his place. When mounted, as they sometimes are, several thousand feet above the earth, with their diminished and delicate outline hardly perceptible against the clear blue of heaven, this harsh sound softened and modulated by distance, and issuing from the immense void above, assumes a supernatural character of tone and impression, that excites, the first time heard, a strangely peculiar feeling.”