The pen is mightier than almost anything on the river, except the flood. The pen here is the female mute swan, Cygnus olor, and her nest is a fortress, a circular thatch of riverbank vegetation laid around the bird like a keep. It looks impregnable but, despite their size and aggression, swans are very vulnerable to egg thieves such as fox, mink or raven, and to the vagaries of the weather that can turn downpours in the river catchments into floods with devastating force. This is probably a second home on the same stretch of water – a couple of weeks ago most swan nests on the rivers Tern and Severn were washed away.
With a ferocious whiteness, bright as may blossom and cow parsley, white as the vapour trail of a high jet in a blue sky with long swan-feather clouds, the bird hunkers, wings and paddle-feet folded in the nest. The S-bend of the neck holds a swallowed cat hiss of warning.
The Tern shimmers with reflections of alder leaves and fleeting swallows. Loose from the nest, a curled flake of down drifts in circles on the surface; below, fish-eyed lenses are triggered by any animation that betrays edibility. A troop of gnats dance like golden passengers in an invisible lift. The swan remains imperiously still, dressed as the main course for an Elizabethan banqueting table. It is on the lookout, watchful of the runway of water that its wings and feet must smack to get it airborne. Once there, it must avoid Parsifal’s arrow in the Wagnerian opera that happens to be playing on the car radio and sounds like spring on the rivers.
This pair of pen (female) and cob (male) mute swans inherited or invaded this pitch along the Tern near its confluence with the River Severn years ago. They occupy a reach where they can upend to get their “teeth” – the serrated edges of their bills – into a plenitude of slippery tubers in the riverbed; they can fly to crop fields and pastures to graze; they are admired. It’s a good life, though always in the shadow of the flood. Eggs will hatch any day now and rain is forecast.
