You can tell right away that Thomas here isn’t mute. He’s a proud and noble Trumpeter Swan!
With a ten foot maximum wingspan, the Trumpeter Swan is the biggest Waterbird in North America and one of the heaviest birds in the world capable of flight.
And man can he bugle!
Brought back from near extinction back in the 1930s, the Trumpeter is one of the great success stories in the history of North American wildlife preservation. At its nadir, there were only about 70 known wild Trumpeter Swans. The turning point was in 1935, when a precious colony of a few thousand Trumpeter Swans were found on Alaska’s Copper River. Thanks to intervention by generous members of the grass-roots Trumpeter Swan Society—and by strong wildlife agencies in previous Presidential administrations, the Trumpeter Swan was reintroduced to the United States and nurtured back to its current numbers,
Today there are more than 46,000 Trumpeters, and you can help protect them from the current Administration’s wholesale dismantling of wildlife protection agencies by supporting the Trumpeter Swan Society.
And don’t mess with them, hey? Thomas will tell the world!
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