Swan Drives

Press, Volume CVIII, Issue 31736, 20 July 1968, Page 12

Swan Drives

The two swan drives at Lake Ellesmere this winter were organised by the North Canterbury Game Shooters’ Club, authorised by the Wildlife Division of the Internal Affairs Department, and helped by the co-operation of the North Canterbury Acclimatisation Society. The success of the drives may be judged from the tally of 3100, give or take a few wounded birds which may have escaped the huntsmen’s notice. Landowners near Lake Ellesmere have complained more loudly than usual this year about the damage done by black swan to their properties. They say that the birds not only compete directly with their livestock for grazing, but foul the pastures and make the grass unpalatable for grazing animals. The size of the black swan population at Lake Ellesmere, the main—perhaps the only—nesting area for the species in Canterbury, can only be guessed; estimates range from 40,000 to 100,000 birds. Nor can anyone say with certainty whether the population is rising, static, or falling, or whether the annual hatchings—ranging from 10,000 to 25,000 or more in recent years—have been matched by the annual mortality. Contradictory statements have been made even by the Acclimatisation Society, which controls the hatchings, about the number of eggs left for hatching in recent years. Black swan, in reasonable numbers, do no harm at Lake Ellesmere. Provided there is no lack of the weed which is their staple diet, they compete for food with neither grazing animals nor the other wildfowl in the area. The damage they do to fanners’ pastures, even when, as at present, the supply of feed in the lake is inadequate, is surely limited. Able to land only on water, they cannot even fly over a fence on dry land. They are one of the least attractive species of wildfowl in New Zealand, of no commercial value, and virtually inedible. This is no justification for breeding them in such numbers that they must be massacred every year by the thousand. It is the best of arguments for reducing the numbers drastically bv the removal of all but a few thousand eggs each year.