50 Fun Facts About Swan

What is a young swan called?

From the Latin via Old French; an adult male is a cob and an adult female a pen.

What is an adult male swan called?

The word comes from Middle English 'cobbe', leader of a group; the female is a pen.

What is a group of swans called?

'Wedge' usually describes swans in V-formation flight; 'bevy' is the general term.

How many living species of true swan are there?

The South American coscoroba swan carries the name but is no longer counted as a true swan.

Swans belong to which family, alongside ducks and geese?

Swans and geese together form the subfamily Anserinae; the swan genus is Cygnus.

The English word 'swan' comes from an Indo-European root meaning what?

That makes 'swan song' something of a tautology; the German Schwan and Swedish svan share the root.

The largest swans can weigh over how much?

Mute, trumpeter and whooper swans can pass 1.5 metres in length with wingspans over 3.1 metres.

The biggest swan ever, the extinct flightless Cygnus falconeri, is known from fossils on which islands?

At over 2 metres from tail to bill it stood taller, though not heavier, than the local dwarf elephants.

Northern Hemisphere swans have pure pale plumage; how do the Southern Hemisphere species differ?

The Australian species has white flight feathers, and its South American cousin has a white body and dark neck.

Which species has pink legs, unlike the blackish-grey legs of the rest?

It lives in southern South America; the four subarctic species have black bills with varying yellow.

The fleshy lump at the base of a mute swan's bill is called what?

It is larger in males and changes with the seasons; one South American species has one too.

Swans are entirely absent from which continent?

They also skip tropical Asia, Central America and northern South America; the mute swan has been introduced across the Atlantic.

What do swans mainly eat?

They up-end or dabble for roots, tubers, stems and leaves; their serrated bills also snag molluscs and small fish now and then.

Trumpeter swans can form monogamous pair bonds as early as what age?

They live to about 24 and only start breeding at 4 to 7, so the bond comes long before the first eggs.

A study of mute swans found what 'divorce' rate among pairs that breed successfully?

Pairs that fail to breed split up three times as often, at 9%.

Along with the whistling ducks, swans are the only anatids in which the male does what?

Nests are about a metre across on the ground near water, and both parents defend them ferociously.

How long is the mute swan's incubation period?

A clutch is four to seven eggs, each around 340 grams.

The genus Cygnus is thought to have evolved where?

It spread across the Northern Hemisphere by the Pliocene; when the southern species branched off is unknown.

Despite living in Eurasia, the mute swan's closest living relative is which bird?

Its curved neck, fluffed wings, bill colour and knob all point to the southern lineage.

Which fairy tale is probably the best-known story about a swan?

Swans also feature in two Wagner operas, Lohengrin and Parsifal, and everywhere as symbols of love and fidelity.

Swan meat was regarded as a luxury food in England during whose reign?

A surviving recipe bakes the boned bird in a 'deep Coffin of Rye Paste' with plenty of butter.

Which is a common misconception about swans in the United Kingdom?

The Crown owns unmarked mute swans in open water, and shares the Thames birds with two City livery companies.

In Greek myth, Zeus took the form of a swan to seduce which queen?

Helen of Troy was conceived from that union; Yeats retold it in his poem Leda and the Swan.

The phrase 'swan song' comes from the ancient belief that which species sang beautifully at death?

The mute swan was sacred to Apollo, who is often shown riding a chariot pulled by swans.

The Latin phrase 'rara avis' descends from Juvenal comparing a good woman to what?

Black swans were unknown to Europeans until the Dutch reached Australia in the 1600s, so the joke meant 'impossible'.

In the Irish legend of the Children of Lir, a stepmother turned the children into swans for how long?

In another tale, The Wooing of Etain, a fairy king and Etain escape as swans; the swan appears on a modern Irish coin.

In Norse myth, two swans drink from which sacred spring in Asgard, whose water turns everything white?

According to the Prose Edda, all swans descend from that original white pair.

Which composer wrote The Swan of Tuonela, based on the Finnish epic Kalevala?

In the Kalevala the swan lives on the river of the underworld, and whoever kills it dies too.

The whooper swan is the national bird of which country?

Five flying swans are the symbol of the Nordic countries as a whole; Denmark chose the mute swan.

Swan Lake's dual lead roles are Odette and Odile, representing what?

The white swan and the black swan are among the hardest roles in Romantic classical ballet.

Who composed the score of Swan Lake?

The 1875-76 score was first staged in 1877; the standard choreography is Petipa and Ivanov's 1895 version for the Mariinsky.

Swan Lake was premiered in 1877 by which company?

Julius Reisinger's original Moscow production was not a success; Petipa and Ivanov's 1895 revival made the ballet's name.

Martin Luther is often depicted with a swan because of a prophecy by which earlier reformer?

Hus, whose name meant 'goose', said in 1414 they would 'roast a goose' but 'in a hundred years hear a swan sing'; Luther's theses came 103 years later.

In Hinduism, the swan is the vehicle of which goddess?

The swan is said to be able to drink the milk from a mix of milk and water, symbolising discernment.

Which Nicaraguan poet made the swan the symbol of the Modernismo movement in Spanish poetry?

A Mexican rival, Enrique González Martínez, tried to end the movement in 1910 with a sonnet titled 'Wring the Swan's Neck'.

Swan Upping, the annual round-up of Thames swans, happens in which month?

Over five days the Crown's uppers, in red, and those of two livery companies row from Sunbury to Abingdon ringing cygnets.

Which two City of London livery companies share ownership of the Thames swans with the Crown?

The tradition of upping on the Thames goes back to the 12th century.

The mute swan has been the national bird of Denmark since which year?

It has an orange beak bordered with black and is 'mute' only relatively; it is less vocal than other swans.

What colour is a mute swan's beak?

Cygnets have dull grey-black bills for their first year, and adult head feathers are often stained rusty by iron in the water.

Europeans first saw black swans in 1697 where, during Willem de Vlamingh's expedition?

The bird has been on Western Australia's flag since 1870 and is the state's official bird.

The black swan is the emblem of Western Australia and of which English seaside town?

It has been the town's emblem for some forty years; the birds escaped from ornamental collections in the 1800s.

By 1933 fewer than how many wild trumpeter swans were known to exist?

Aerial surveys then found several thousand around Alaska's Copper River, and reintroductions lifted numbers past 46,000 by 2010.

The trumpeter swan is the heaviest living bird native to which continent?

It is also the largest living waterfowl, with a wingspan of up to 3 metres, and a close relative of Eurasia's whooper.

Bewick's swan, a subspecies of the tundra swan, is named after a man famous for what?

William Yarrell named it in 1830 after Thomas Bewick, the great wood engraver.

What was the old English name for the whooper swan, recorded in Willughby and Ray's 1676 Ornithology?

Unrelated to the deer, it comes from Old Norse elft and is cognate with the Latin albus, white.

What is an adult female swan called?

British studies found pens average around 8.5 to 9.7 kg, noticeably lighter than cobs.

What sound is most associated with mute swans, audible from one to two kilometres away?

The noise is unique to the species and seems to serve as a contact signal between birds in the air.

An unusually large Polish mute swan cob set what record at almost 23 kg?

Whether the heavyweight could still get airborne has been questioned; a normal big cob tops out around 15 kg.

What is the mute swan's threat display, with neck curved back and wings half raised, called?

Swans also use the same posture as a sail to windsurf several hundred metres across the water.

Which animal most often preys on mute swan cygnets in New York state?

In their native Europe, wild boars and hooded crows take the eggs while pike and American mink occasionally grab cygnets.