THE ARKANSAS DEMOCRAT-GAZETTE

Sixteen trumpeter swans from Iowa were released near Dardanelle on Wednesday morning in hopes they will one day leave Arkansas.

More than 50 people, including several children, gathered at the Holla Bend National Wildlife Refuge to watch and participate in the release. Onlookers ignored the cold as members of the Iowa Department of Natural Resources unloaded the huge birds and invited people to get a closer look.

Once in the firm grasp of a handler, the birds appeared docile, often draping their long necks around their handlers’ shoulders. They didn’t react when people touched their downy feathers or took photos.

The release was a noisy affair involving 16 people, each hugging one of the 30-pound birds. At the end of a short countdown, the birds went flapping and splashing to freedom, some paddling off only a few yards out into the water and others putting distance between them and their former captors.

Joe Neal of Fayetteville, coauthor with Douglas James of the popular book Birds of Arkansas, said he was delighted to witness North America’s largest native waterfowl set free. It also was an important moment for him and others.

“It’s restoring diversity and undoing part of our heritage in wrong land management,” he said.

Karen Rowe, coordinator of the nongame migratory bird program for the Arkansas Game and Fish Commission, said bird enthusiasts love watching the swans.

“Swans are so majestic,” she said. “They are so large. They bring out something in people that enhances their ties to the land.”

Game and Fish Commissioner George Dunklin Jr., who released one of the swans Wednesday, said he hoped Arkansans would have more of an appreciation for the wetlands, which make possible the effort to help the trumpeter swan rebound.

The effort to help the swan “is an important thing for us, and we are excited about it,” Dunklin said.

Rowe said the main diet of trumpeter swans is aquatic vegetation found in wetlands.

The release of the swans at the refuge is the final step of a three-year experiment undertaken by the Iowa Department of Natural Resources and the Arkansas Game and Fish Commission to encourage the swans to migrate to north-central Iowa where they were raised.

The program also was endorsed by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, the Mississippi Flyway Council and The Trumpeter Swan Society, society Executive Director John Cornely said in an e-mail.

Ron Andrews, Iowa’s Trumpeter Swan Restoration Program coordinator, said Iowa has had success in increasing the population of the swans over the past decade to the point where the swans will soon sustain their population without man’s help.

But not having been raised in the wild, the swans have forgotten how to migrate, Andrews said.

Cornely said it is believed that swans once nested in the prairie and Great Lake states and wintered on wetlands in the Gulf and Atlantic coasts.

Andrews said attempts were made to help the swans resume their migrations but were not successful. Then the idea was hatched to instill the migrating instinct by taking the birds south and seeing if they would return home.

Arkansas was the only Southern state that expressed an interest in participating in the experiment, Andrews said.

“We hope that urge [to migrate] is strong enough where they will go north,” Rowe said.

In 2008, the first year of the experiment, 13 trumpeter swans from Iowa were released at Holla Bend and in the Boxley Valley near the Buffalo River. Last year, 11 more were released. Andrews said only one swan has returned to the starting point in north-central Iowa, though others could have returned to near the area but haven’t been spotted or reported.

Some have left Arkansas and returned, but officials don’t know where they went when they left the state.

After this year’s swans were raised, they were released in Iowa for about a month so they could set their internal compasses, as Andrews put it. The swans then were recaptured and loaded onto a trailer for the two-day trip to Arkansas.

Rowe said the swans appeared to be adjusting to their new home Wednesday. After their release, she spotted them in the water bathing, preening and flapping their wings, a sign of contentment, she said.

Andrews hopes the swans will return north in the spring to breed, then return to Arkansas for the winter, setting a pattern he hopes will continue.

Andrews and Rowe said they hope observers who spot the swans, which will be wearing large green bands around their necks, will report their movement.

Holla Bend and Boxley Valley are not the only places in Arkansas where the trumpeter swans are found, Rowe said. She said as many as 200 return each year to Magness Lake east of Heber Springs.

But she and Andrews said they are worried that the large population will make the swans on Magness Lake more susceptible to disease. Several small scattered populations will ensure healthier populations, they said.

If this experiment is successful, officials in Iowa hope to increase the migration path the trumpeter swans take and that they will migrate farther into the South, Andrews said.

Cornely stressed that it is too early to tell if the migration experiment will be successful. But the more habitat area the swans pioneer, the more successful they will be, he said.

“It is a small step, but one that has the potential for us to learn and apply to swan conservation efforts elsewhere,” Cornely said.