Spring and summer are eventful seasons for our Mute Swans. Backwoodsman sees them returning to old nest sites on the Forth and Clyde Canal. Some of these sites seem a bit accessible to annoying humans and potential predators; Mute Swans are quite handy in a scrap but they can be a worry. The Firhill Basin nest has always given most cause for concern. There was a chap who popped up a few years ago and used to walk the canal every day. He would hurl industrial quantities of bread at anything he could see on the water. When the swans nested at the Basin (right by Partick Thistle’s ground), he started to hang out by the nest and even began attempting to landscape it, digging them a moat and installing garden tat from the middle-of-Lidl while the swans looked on bemused. Backwoodsman grew increasingly uneasy and even telephoned the SSPCA to report this as an act of animal cruelty; they didn’t seem to think it was cruel to loom constantly within feet of wild birds attempting to go about their legitimate breeding business. There weren’t any cygnets that year. I haven’t seen him for a long time; his rubbish was cleared away and the swans got back into their groove. I found six cygnets when I ran on the canal last week . The images that follow were acquired in previous years.
Summer proper sees the rather extraordinary business of Swan Upping (the annual census of the swan population living on the River Thames). I became aware of this event from the painting “Swan Upping at Cookham” by Stanley Spencer. It’s in the Tate and the gallery note says that: “This painting shows an annual ritual on the Thames that continues to this day. Unmarked swans on the river belong to the British Crown. Those owned by two guilds, the Companies of Vintners and Dyers, are marked in a ‘swan upping’ ceremony every year. Here the swans are being brought ashore at Cookham. Spencer said he was inspired to make this work while he was in church and could hear people on the river outside: ‘the village seemed as much a part of the atmosphere prevalent in the church as the most holy part of the church.’ This fusion of the everyday and the divine was typical of his attitude to his Christian faith.”
I first saw the painting in postcard form when I was in Cambridge in the early-to-mid ‘Eighties. Tales of the extravagance of College Fellows’ dining arrangements were popular among right-on students, and the right of Johnians to eat swan at High Table was the top item, and probably apocryphal to boot. I was never completely smitten by the overtly religious Stanley Spencers I came across in Cambridge but I was delighted to discover the Shipbuilding on the Clyde series which he executed in Port Glasgow during the 1940s.
Swans usually nest at Pinkston Basin, Bilsland Drive Aqueduct and at Old Farm Lane – the latter two nests are practically on the towpath. The Cob from the third nest has been known to deny passage to walkers and cyclists. Cygnets grow up quickly and it’s very pleasing to see an adult pair hanging on to all or most of their progeny, even if the adults may well drive the young away in due course (their first Autumn). This group is sailing back onto Firhill Basin under the Nolly Brig.
I used to think that Swan Upping referred to some forced physical relocation of swans, perhaps moving them away from a weir or flight of locks. Had I convinced myself that these apparently serene creatures would defer to the Monarchy and stay where they had been put?
When we saw this pair walking up the Lock flight at Maryhill via the towpath to get to the Summit Pound, I joked to myself that these were republican Glasgow swans and no Queen was upping them, thank you.
The locals were waiting for them and defended their territory with vigour. I’m assuming we were watching a new pair looking for a breeding territory and finding the canal quite busy.
Backwoodsman apologises for a late posting this week – a fishing day on Friday, and Saturday on the Tarmachan Ridge rather threw out the schedule. There is holiday coming (hurrah!) and the next post is planned for Saturday 24th June.
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