Another Life: With the wind gone safely north and tucked behind the ridge, there has been a sudden stillness to the hillside and the lakes along the shore.
Along with the ravens, whose throaty exclamations I discussed here lately, those of the wintering whooper swans have also claimed a share of this unseasonable silence. The mossy cliff beyond the lake has the acoustics of a Greek amphitheatre, attending to their softest calls with a bell-like clarity.
My rapture over whooper music is well on record: flugelhorn and oboe in a Bach variation I never want to end. There's a sad little descant of three falling notes, and a whole suite of individual buglings, right up to strident alarm: kloo-kloo-kloo! But it's the gentle, echoing, antiphonal chords - the swan duets - that turn my heart over.
These are real duets, too - part of the bonding contact between cob and pen. A recording made in Iceland revealed how deliberate they are: a controlled, antiphonal calling between the pair, with gradual and matching increases in duration. Trust science to pick love apart in this way - still arguing, even, about whether cob or pen has the higher voice. And when it comes to transcribing whooper dialects, music flies straight out the window.
"Ahng-ha oglank oklang ONK ONK Loo-ang A Klooang ok ok ok Whoop-aaa" is one such transcription, noted as "almost poetic" in a big new book on the bird.
With 500-odd pages, The Whooper Swan (Poyser, £45 sterling) is the first monograph on the species, written out of long and devoted study by a widely travelled field ornithologist and writer, Mark Brazil. UK-educated, he is currently Professor of Biodiversity and Conservation in Hokkaido, Japan, right at the other end of the whooper swan's range across Europe and Asia.
It was a much earlier book of exquisite photographs of the whooper swans of Hokkaido, by Japan's Teiji Saga, that first woke me to their presence on the other side of the world. Saga's birds are cloaked in snow as they sleep on frozen lakes, or drift wreathed in mist at daybreak - images that fit one's most lyrical imaginings about swans in the wild. But, while Saga's devotion to stalking his birds is beyond question, not all the winter whoopers of northern Japan are so difficult to access. Sightseers brandishing food have made many winter flocks quite confiding, so that, as Brazil describes, some loaf around on a snowbound car-park at the shore, waiting to be fed rice crackers flavoured with Antarctic krill - and, of course, to be captured in digital snaps. Villages wanting a share of the whooper tourism have been broadcasting swan calls on loudspeakers in the hope of luring the birds.
It is the great sweep of the whoopers' distribution, and its breeding biology on forested lakelands right across from Sweden to Kamchatka, that is documented so thoroughly in Brazil's book. But the long and busy history of ornithology in Britain and Ireland has brought the closest scientific attention to whoopers that breed at tundra pools in Iceland and fly to Ireland in October.
Given the swan's place in such tales as the Children of Lir, with echoes that chime with Nordic, Greek and even Tibetan myths, it can seem extraordinary that whoopers have been so uncommon in Ireland for so long. Up to the 1930s, only Lough Swilly was listed as a regular haunt, whereas by the 1970s it was a regular visitor.
Today, 12,800 swans - some two-thirds of the Icelandic total - migrate to our shores and lakes in October. Was the whooper really so rare in the past, asks Brazil, or was it just undercounted? "The extraordinary significance of Ireland" for the Icelandic population was, he admits "long overlooked by English ornithologists, though no doubt not by Irish ones." Not until the 1980s did its full extent, and the pattern of onward journeys to Scotland, become clear.
It has long been conventional wisdom that the sudden spread of the whoopers from about the early 1940s replaced a dwindling winter population of the much smaller, rather goose-like Bewick's swans, winter visitors from eastern Europe. Was this "extraordinarily symmetrical shift" a real one, Brazil wonders, or was there a lingering confusion between the two birds that messed up the records? Whatever of that, the whooper swans shared between Iceland and Ireland today seem to be showing a steady increase. Across most of their range, indeed (except for parts of Russia and Siberia, where oil is spilling into lakes), the sheer beauty of the birds is keeping them fairly safe. A dramatic exception is on the whooper's wintering grounds on the coast of China where, as Brazil relates, it is massively hunted for the restaurants of Guangzhou and Shanghai.
