We are not big on swans here. I love them of course but, to my knowledge the Tamar Valley is not natural swan territory and we never see them either drifting around or flying overhead. I'd be thrilled if we did, the nearest might be on the canal at Exeter, but we can't have a monopoly on all nature's glories after all...
Only the other day we counted fifteen buzzards flying overhead...
And Bookhound and I had this close encounter with a handsome fox up on Dartmoor a while back...
The Company of Swans by Jim Crumley, with engravings by Harry Brockway, caught my eye in a charity shop recently and I spent a happy/sad afternoon reading it because Jim Crumley's encounter with a pair of mute swans doesn't quite end happily, the denouement quoted on the cover of the book...
'A small mound of white feathers lies on a tussock of grass made grey by a Highland winter. It is all the monument there will ever be to the life of a swan.'
We're going to be talking about pens and cobs today, female and male swans for the uninitiated of which I was one. I think I knew but I'd forgotten... if it had been a quiz question would I have known...
The swans live and nest on a loch near to Jim Crumley's Scottish home from where he is able to watch year on year as the pen loses every batch of eggs laid to an unknown predator, whilst the cob increasingly spends more time away from his mate. It is apparently not quite true that swans mate for life because in the case of the Crumley Two, when a new and younger model appears on the loch, our cob's neck is turned and he's off a-wooing leaving his mate to fend for herself.
Despite Jim Crumley's best efforts to help the nesting swan lay her eggs in a safer place it is to no avail as batch after batch disappears (spoiler alert : if not floods then down the throat of an otter as it turns out) and it is clear, perhaps in the interests of the preservation of the species, that the cob must seek a new mate.
Exploring the myths and legends surrounding swans Jim Crumley emerges with a single common denominator...
'At the heart of many of these legends is a single idea - that the human soul flies on in the swan after death.'
He terms it an 'understandable obsession', the notion of the afterlife as a place to be reached and what better way than with wings, and if it is to be wings then none better ' than the exquisite and seemingly unstoppable flight of the swans.' Of course it all begs the question, when faced with the death of a swan...
'Who cares for the soul of a swan?'
At just forty pages the book is a treasure of a read. I defy anyone to emerge dry-eyed from Jim Crumley's close encounter with the deserted pen. Close enough to touch her the the swan grows still...
'Very slowly over several minutes, her neck fell further and further back and down towards her folded wings. Her head tipped slightly forward. For ten minutes she slept in my shadow.'
It's a bit like (but then again perhaps nothing like) that moment when you hypnotise a chicken, which we used to do with great regularity when we kept them, and I was as moved as Jim Crumley with the swan moment...
'I have always tried to be dispassionate, objective, in my dealings with wildlife; as matter-of-fact as nature itself. But I recognised the single emotion that was my response to the sleeping swan and it was love; as pure as it was undeniable.'
Forty pages of utterly joyous and emotional reading and a generous hat tip must go to Harry Brockway whose engravings give life, feeling and movement to The Company of Swans in ways it is hard to describe; the graceful curve of the necks of these preening swans perfectly captured in the wood.
If there is one even greater sadness than the death of the swan it is the fact that this book, published in 1997 and thus before the current rush of 'nature writing', is now out of print and at a time when it would sell by the barrow load given our new-found sensibilities for subjects like this. Here's hoping someone somewhere in the publishing world will pick it up and run with it again, and meanwhile I am hoping that if anyone wants to read it their library or You-Know-Where will oblige.
Swans...
Do they conjure up any literary, poetic or artistic thoughts or connections for you...
Me, I was dashing to the Stanley Spencer shelf to check out Swan Upping at Cookham...
And then this from the RSPB website...
'The role of swan-upping was to round up unmarked cygnets and once the parentage of the cygnets had been established to the Swanmaster's satisfaction, the birds could be marked appropriately and returned to the wild. The ceremony exists these days in a largely symbolic form, although as an exercise it is useful in monitoring the condition and number of swans on the Thames.
The only two companies that still observe the tradition of owning swans on the Thames are the Worshipful Companies of Vintners and Dyers. The Royal swans are no longer marked, but an unmarked mute swan on the Thames is regarded as belonging to the Queen by default. The Queen still maintains an officially-appointed Swan Keeper, and the ceremony still takes place on the Monday of the third week in July.
The Queen has a prerogative over all swans in England and Wales. The Swan Keeper also dispatches swans all over the world, sent as gifts in the Queens name.'
So now we know.
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