JACKSON, Wyo. — Swans have long been a symbol of love, and the Trumpeters who are part of Wyoming Wetlands Society’s (WWS) work in Jackson Hole are no exception.
According to Bill Long, program coordinator for WWS, swan pairs represent a lifelong commitment with few exceptions. In the wild, swans will pick their own mate, but for WWS’ captive breeding pairs that can be seen at ponds like Valley Springs and Boyles Hill, it’s more of a matchmaking scenario.
“We do a lot of arranged marriages, and we’ve been pretty lucky about meshing pairs,” Long told Buckrail in 2024.
According to Long, part of the work he does to match up breeding pairs is driven by an effort to maintain genetic diversity. He says diversity in a population is important for disease resistance and bird fitness, among other things. Breeding between related family members risks weakening the genetic strain.
“We tend to try and outbreed, and pick birds in our arranged marriages that are from different broods,” Long said.
Interestingly, this doesn’t always happen in the wild. Long says because of the low number of wild swans in Jackson Hole, there’s the potential to have one top pair repeatedly producing young year after year; as all those young swans grow up and start mixing, it’s not unlikely that the mate they end up choosing could be their sibling and result in inbreeding. Long says outcrossing or outbreeding is the goal to maximize genetic diversity.
The success of WWS’ breeding program pairings can be seen in the release of cygnets, or young swans, in the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem, part of an effort to increase territorial pairs of swans after decades of decline in Yellowstone National Park. Long says swans tend to come back to the same territories, so the goal is for the cygnets to continue returning to the area and establishing their own nest sites with their mates.
Pairing up for the long-term also enables swans to develop their parenting skills over time together. Long suggests that the older a pair is, the better they are at raising their young.
As courting season is happening, breeding pairs at Boyles Hill can be seen teaching their cygnets part of the performance. Long says courting involves the male and female coming together face to face and head-bobbing, which forms the classic heart-shape between the two bent heads.
Some of the pairs at Boyles have been matched up recently, while others have been together for as long as 17 years. They continue to court each other.
Long notes that the longer two birds are together, the longer the surviving swan will likely take to re-pair after losing its mate. The slow acceptance suggests that swans do experience some type of reaction to the loss.
“If you want to put it into human terms, there’s clearly a mourning,” Long said. He notes, however, that going as far as anthropomorphizing their behavior and calling it heartbreak when one mourns the other might be a stretch.
Long says WWS typically sees re-matches for one of their swans take up to a month.
This story runs annually.
