WILD SWANS 8 1 



our wild swan visitors, breed in the farthest North, 

 Iceland, in Lapland, and on the enormous fringe 

 tundra which runs along the rim of the Old World 

 from the White Sea eastwards. When the late Mr. 

 Seebohm and Mr. Harvie-Brown were waiting together 

 on the Petchora River to see and mark the arrival 

 of the birds from the South to nest in the Arctic 

 tundras, almost the first birds to come were the wild 

 swans. These would not be the birds from Norfolk, 

 but possibly those which had spent the winter on the 

 Caspian Sea. In the spring each pair flies some 

 thousand miles north, probably to nest on or near 

 the spot where its ancestors reared their cygnets 

 centuries ago. In the valley of the Yenisei, where 

 Mr. Seebohm saw them when he accompanied Captain 

 Wiggins on one of his bold adventures through the 

 Kara Sea, the hoopers appeared on 5th May. On 

 the Petchora they arrived in pairs on nth May, flying 

 high overhead, and soon settled down in the willow 

 scrub which covered the islands, and there built their 

 great nests of sedge and reared their young. 



Besides the hooper, we are visited in hard winters 

 by a smaller wild species, which the old naturalist 

 Pallas identified a century ago. It is known as 

 Bewick's swan, and though smaller than the hooper, 

 comes from even more distant lands. Like certain 

 other species, this bird vanishes from all human 

 i knowledge in the spring, as if it had become trans- 

 formed into the snow-clouds with which Northern 

 fancy identified its race. It is now known to nest 

 : on lands so profoundly remote that the previous 



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