Swan at the First Thanksgiving

Bear with me as this blog starts with a fish story. I was listening to an archaeology podcast yesterday that was using ancient mosaics to help preserve an endangered Mediterranean fish. The fish, a delicacy has been overfished for centuries and is now difficult to find outside of relatively deep water. Ancient Roman mosaics show much larger versions of this fish, a grouper, being caught from shore. The pictures are backed up by Pliny the Elder who wrote about the fish and the fishing methods before he turned his attention to watching Mt. Vesuvius erupt-still waiting for his report on that. It turns out that in protected ocean sanctuaries the fish still behaves like it did in Roman times and while not quite as large as it was then, it is bigger on average than fish in unprotected areas.

That got me thinking about a well done article in the Boston Globe about the first Thanksgiving. Nothing too new here. I used to do a presentation for third graders about the foods of the first Thanksgiving and the sources are pretty sparse. That's why I was surprised to see swan on the menu in this year's article. The swans we see swimming around places like the Norton Reservoir today are Mute Swans, a species introduced from Europe to decorate 19th century estates with their beauty and lousy dispositions. To the Pilgrims this was their swan from home, but there is no evidence they brought this bird with them. I knew that in the pamphlet "Hockomock Wonder Wetland"(still available online) author Kathleen Anderson included Whistling Swan (Cygnus columbianus) as a rare migrant in our area. This bird is also known as the Tundra Swan and it is indeed rare in Bristol County. The birds look more goose-like than the Mute Swan since they lack the typical curved swan neck. They range from 7.5 to 21 pounds with 15 pounds being average; Mute Swans are substantially larger. As the name tundra indicates these swans breed in the Arctic. The birds are migratory and the easternmost population winters on the coast from Maryland south to Florida. Every once and awhile a bird's compass  messes up, and it ends up here. In Plymouth County you might expect to see one Tundra Swan in a day of bird watching. The only problem is that in the last century all the records of Tundras in Plymouth County come from the return migration in March and April. No Tundra Swan reports come from the September to early November period when we believe the first Thanksgiving took place. Here in Bristol County you have almost no chance of seeing a Tundra Swan. However, it looks from the record that the ONE that was seen was seen in November. If you wanted a white waterfowl for Thanksgiving you'd have a much better chance of gunning down a 7 pound Snow Goose. These birds follow the same migration pattern as the Tundra Swan, but many more end up on our coast. Again the peak period is the late winter/early spring (that's when I saw mine in Easton), but there are strays in Plymouth county in October and November.

On the other hand, observers from the Hampshire Birding Club reported 19 Tundra Swans on the Quabbin on November 20, 2010. Here's the link to the picture. The photographer thought this was incredible and so do I. Why all the fuss? On my part I know that migration patterns of birds are susceptible to relatively quick changes due to climate change so the idea that there might have been enough swans here for Thanksgiving dinner might be a clue to our climate. Here's the problem though. The pilgrims arrived here at the end of the Little Ice Age so our climate was cooler than today's even without factoring in human caused global warming. If the swans like to spend the winter in warmer whether wouldn't they have been less likely to have been here in Pilgrim times? In fact, the photo from the Quabbin may be an indication that the birds are expanding their winter range northward today and that they were even rarer in 1621. I'm posting now, but I'll check on some historical records and finish this story tomorrow! My advice-stick with turkey!