i realize this is a lot of photos of swans, but i can’t help it. we love the swans, and when they come sailing majestically over to see us, it’s such a beautiful sight. here they are, so happy that i came down with plenty of bread.
I realize i could have done a little more editing and not posted so many of these pictures, but i love them all. there’s something so symmetrical about them, and they’re just so white and lovely…this, no doubt, is why the ballet is called “swan lake” and not “goose lake” or “duck lake.” although i do have to say that the swan hissing isn’t such a pretty sight, but it does make me laugh. one of the swans hisses at mollie a lot.
it’s just amazing how so often they seem to be mirroring each other. once again, perfect for the ballet. if only we had a whole bunch of swans, i bet it’d be easy to coax them into a ballet, with just a bit more bread as enticement.
mollie love swan-feeding time. of course i break down and give her a little bit of bread, throwing it as far as i can up on the shore so she’ll stay away for at least three seconds. and of course i can’t throw worth a damn so she only has to run about five feet. because i had multiple pieces of bread and buns and the camera in my hands, i stuff a couple of rolls in my pocket. i heard mollie gnawing on something and looked down to see that she’d pulled one of them from my pocket and was happily chewing away. i tried to pull it out of her mouth but only got about half.
it might have fallen; maybe she wasn’t THAT greedy. but she could have been.
this is the swan hissing. because she is infinitely more observant about human and animal nature than i am, amy noticed that only one swan did the hissing, and that it was the…bigger one? i can’t remember how it was different from the other one, but she knew.
the swan is now saying WHERE’S MORE BREAD, DAMNIT???
when the bread was gone, off they sailed.
here are two videos i took of the swans having a snack.
amy went down to feed the swans yesterday, and she called me (from the dock) to say that the swans were very hungry and needed more bread. we’d just taken mollie for a trudge through the snow and i was too tired and cold to go outside again, so amy went back up at least a couple of times to get them more bread. i gave them old buns and bread from the freezer, but she gave them good stuff – a quarter loaf of my homemade french bread, and some other good fresh bread she had. no wonder they were so hungry. we both observed that when the swans were full, they quickly turned their backs on us even though there was still bread floating in the water. i did notice, though, after i’d gone up to the house, that the swans did come back and eat the leftovers.
it is so cold today – the high will be 12 – that i really don’t want to feed them. but on the other hand, i hope they come back because it’s so cold that surely they’ll be extra hungry.
ok then,
mrs. swan hughes.