Time for Tundra Swans
This cold weather will be bringing in the swans
Any day now, the Upper Mississippi River, in southern Minnesota near the Iowa border, will start hosting ten of thousands of arriving tundra swans on their annual migration from the Arctic Circle to their wintering grounds on the East Coast. The swans come down to Pools 7 & 8 on the Mississippi to feed and rest up for the next easterly leg of their trip. These “pools” are vast water surface areas on the river which provide enough space and shallow vegetation to feed a large gathering of waterfowl. The swans will stick around for a few weeks until the Mississippi River starts to freeze before heading on to the east where many end up wintering on Chesapeake Bay.
This large migration goes pretty much unnoticed by Minnesotans probably because the swans are not likely to stop or spend much time on our lakes but instead make longer overland flights to a special part of the Mississippi River that is rather remote.
On their way to the River, many swans fly right over the Twin Cities area, giving us a wonderful opportunity to witness their migration. They tend to fly in groups of 30 to 40 birds in a V formation. I usually hear the swans first before locating them overhead. They will call nonstop as they are migrating even during the nocturnal flights - take a listen:
Of the two native swan species in North America, the tundra swan outnumbers the larger trumpeter swan with an estimated breeding population of 280,000 to 63,000. The trumpeter swan will stay in Minnesota all year and travel around locally to find open water in the winter. On the other hand, the tundra swan is our early winter visiter whose arrival in large numbers tells us how important Minnesota and the Mississippi River are to the health of this species.
Another fascinating entry!