California can kill these big, beautiful swans

From Ryan SabalowCalmness

This story was originally published by CalmattersS Register about their ballots.

In early August, it did not take long to notice the first pair of huge white swans with orange and black bills and graceful, twisting necks as they floated in the swamp along the Levee Road side of Solano County.

They struck into the vegetation as the pickup truck passed through the wildlife area of Grizli Island. In short driving later, along a herd of a dozen tulle elk, two more swans appeared in the swamp, along the dirty road. Then four more. A few hundred yards on the road, out into the distance, passing with a thicket of swinging reeds, dozens of swans floated in the water.

For the careless bird observers, the view of all these majestic animals can be a pleasure and bring to the minds of swan themes, such as “ice and swan” and “ugly duck”.

But for the biologists of the wetlands and others with a share in the health of the surrounding Delta Sacramento-Son Joaquin, the largest mouth on the west coast, the birds represent the latest-and-exponentially growing compression for the few remaining moist areas left in California.

These are crazy swans, a native of Europe and Asia. Weighing up to 30 pounds and with the wings of up to eight feet, they are the largest bird in the swamp and are not the least shy to throw their weight around.

TerritorialEspecially during the breeding season, they are known to drown smaller animals and have Killed at least one American kayakS They have displaced the colonies of nesting of local birds in other parts of the United States that have invaded. Mouty swans also feeds insanely from the submerged vegetation, destroying the life of the plants on which other local species depends on the plants.

“They can be a nice, big, white bird … and they can be charismatic, but they can be quite nasty,” says Brad Bortner, retired chief of bird management programs in the US and wildlife in Washington DC DC

In 2008, California banned anyone without special permission not to hold the mud swans as pets or to import them to the country. The hope was to withdraw from another destructive invasive species that is mastered in the country.

It didn’t work out. The swans’ population has erupted in just a few years. In 2022, biologists of state waterfowl estimated that they were 1150 of them. This springThey rated more than 12,000, almost double a year. The majority of the swans of the crazy are in Suisun Marsh, a scattered complex of public wetlands, agricultural land and private duck hunting clubs on the outskirts of the bay area near Fairfield.

“We continue to watch them climb and climb and climb,” says Melanie Weaver, a waterfowl coordinator in the California Department of Fish and Wildlife.

A measure before the state legislative body aims to allow hunters and landowners to shoot swans over the next five years to try to reduce their number to more well-controlled levels in the Delta of Sacramento-San Hoaquin and outside.

Hunting groups supporting Assembly Bill 764 Essentially ask: If the Californians are fine with the expenses More than $ 13 million From 2018 to kill Nearly 6000 Nutria, 20-pound, orange teeth from South America, which have invaded the same waterways, why not allow hunters and landowners to do the same and by jamming swans free?

“If the population gets too large and out of control, it can be beyond our ability, then we really manage them,” Mark Hennel, a lobbyist for the California Association of Waterfall Birds, Told the water assembly committee, parks and wild animals This spring. “So we want to overtake the problem.”

Objective groups for animal welfare

This argument has so far been surprisingly easy to sell in the legislature, despite passionate and influential activists to combat California. Similar suggestions for killing swans have led to protests in other countries.

The measure easily accepted the assembly without a legislator to vote against. It is now hanging in the Senate of California.

So far no group has opposed the measure, according to Calmatters Database of digital democracyBut that may change soon.