No idea why I find them so fascinating but here is another part of it. I only learned this second hand but it is a good story. Late last summer someone on the Kenai Peninsula south of here shot a swan with an arrow. The swan was spotted swimming around a lake with the arrow sticking out of it. A team from the Alaska Sealife Center managed to capture the swan and take it to their facility.
They named her Marshmallow which would not have been my choice but will have to do. There they removed the arrow, treated the wound and nursed her back to health. When it seemed she had recovered fully they returned her to the lake where they had found her, and in time, before the southward migration had begun. There she was greeted by what was assumed to be her mate; they, like geese, mate for life.
Everything seemed to be fine until the migration started and the swans flew south. Someone checked the lake and Marshmallow was still there. Her wing had not healed well enough or strong enough for her to make the trip and it looked like the other swans had left her behind. The crew from the Sealife Center captured her again and then managed to find a way to send her south for the winter. She flew down in a pet carrier on an airplane.
People in Washington released her onto a lake where she immediately flew into a tizzy and chased two other swans away. So the injured swan at least ended up somewhere south for the winter, has enough moxie to be feisty and perhaps will gain enough strength to make it back next summer. A happy ending, except perhaps for losing her mate. Well, winter came down on us fast and that lake froze. A few days after she made her safe trip south, someone ventured over to the lake again.
There, walking around on the ice was another swan, alone in the winter apparently displaced, perhaps lost, perhaps looking for Marshamallow, his mate everyone assumed had been left behind by the others. Now he was the one left behind. One can only hope there is more of this story yet to be written.
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