Nether Wallop Mill, Hampshire, England
3rd June 2014
Look away if you are squeamish. The chalkstreams are incredibly
beautiful but scratch the surface and it's a pretty tough place to survive.
Otters eat fish. Mink eat water voles. Owls eat field mice. Fish eat other
fish. Bats consume 3000 insects a night. A heron just loves a frog. Kingfishers
can dip for a minnow a minute for hours on end. I could go on but you get the
picture. This being the natural world, albeit a very picturesque one, that is
the nature of things but sometimes something happens that rams it all home.
Swans are famously
aggressive. Tales of human broken arms abound, though I have never heard them
substantiated but the truth is a rearing, hissing cob barring your path along
the river to protect his cygnets is a pretty scary thing. Territorial
they are and at certain times of the year I am sure we have all seen the turf
wars as one swan drives away another, but last week at Broadlands Estate on the
River Test it went to an extreme I have never seen. The angler that day takes
up the story:
"The weather was more like early April rather than late May,
however the Mayfly were emerging and a good few trout succumbed to our dry
flies. Sharing the beat with us was a pair of swans. This pair was doing
their usual act of always being in the way, having a
hissing fit whenever you walked past and being in the river just where a decent
fish was rising.
Midway through the afternoon we walking up the stretch when the
male came charging upstream, followed by his partner. Looking upstream we could
see another swan had entered the beat and was starting to feed on the
ranunculus. The intruder kept feeding until the incumbent male got within
around 10 yards, then turned around and charged into it. Rather like two stags
a great fight broke out with flapping of wings and attacking each other with
their beaks.
However the incumbent male was much stronger and was immediately on
top of the intruder and griping
its neck with his beak. It then started to beat the body of the intruder swan
with its feet whilst repeatedly pushing its head under water. This went on for
some minutes and the incumbent female joined in the attack too. Very soon the
intruder swan seemed to give up and offered no resistance. The male
incumbent swan kept its grip on the other swan's neck and kept holding the head
under water even when it was clearly dead. All three drifted down stream
with the two incumbents continuing to attack the dead swan until they came
close to a low bridge and they finally left it alone. "
Over the years I have seen swans kill geese but never their own
kind. It just goes to show how cruel nature can be sometimes.
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