Weds., Mar. 21, 2007
   Last night I was on a stake out.  I tried several times earlier to catch the suspects leaving their home. This time I was going to stick it out until sunset.  As the 7:30 pm hour passed, there was still no activity. The sun was dipping low in the west.  I eyed their door with my binoculars and spotted a movement off to the right.  False alarm, it was one of the little neighbors going for take out. 

  By 7:45 pm I was fighting boredom and beginning to think that the last night of winter would end up being a bust. I decided to leave when things got too dark- there are no streetlights here and I don’t have one of those fancy night vision things.  At 8:00 pm the sun had journeyed below the horizon and it was getting hard to see.  I glassed the entrance one more time and…there, a movement.  She was out in a flash and into the water before I could take in the scene.  She had a bunch of grass, or something in her mouth, but it all happened so quickly.  The water rippled and she was gone.

  My suspect, in this case was a female muskrat at a bank den along a nameless Monroe County ditch. I was trying to observe some of the family’s behavior.  But, this was all I observed.  Well, there was the Meadow Vole that scampered up the hill behind the den, but that was hardly front page news.

  I reached for the ignition but a faint sound prompted a pause.  It was a cooing sound from high above. I poked my head out the window and observed a flight of 16 Tundra Swans headed north. Their white bodies gleamed a ghostly white against the dark sky. They were arranged in a sloppy “V” and calling constantly.

  Our local Tundra Swans departed the region a week ago.  These large white birds come down from the high Arctic to spend their winters here on the Detroit River and further east on the Atlantic Coast.  The birds I now observed had to be migrants from the Chesapeake Bay area.  They follow a diagonal route across the Lower Peninsula and over to the Alberta prairies and then north to Alaska & the N.W. Territories.

  They were very high up, but I know that every one of the birds had exactly 20 tail feathers.  How do I know that? Well, I looked it up in Walter Barrow’s 1912 classic Michigan Bird Life.  It’s right there on page 121.  Although I knew it already, a little research confirmed that Adult Tundra Swans are solid white, with a prominent black bill with a yellow spot ahead of the eye.  They have a five and a half foot wingspan and weigh over 12 lbs or so. 

  Another thing worthy of mention is the scientific name – you know that fancy Latin thing right next to the common name.  In Barrow’s book, the scientific name of the Tundra Swan is given as Olor columbianus (Ord).  Since then, the first name (called the genus name) has been changed to Cygnus which is the familiar Latin for Swan.  The second name is the species name and the best translation of it means “of Columbus,” or something like that.  I don’t mean Columbus, Ohio but the guy.

  To find out why someone would name a bird after an explorer who never saw a Tundra Swan, you have to go to the third name in the parenthesis – Ord.  That stands for 19^th century naturalist George Ord who was responsible for naming the species in 1815. Unfortunately, he never explained why he chose the columbianus , and he has been dead since 1866 so we can’t ask him. 

  How did Mr. Ord get the opportunity to name this bird, you ask (or not)?  He was one of the naturalists who examined the specimens brought back by Lewis and Clark and the Corps. of Discovery.  They had observed this bird, and the larger Trumpeter Swan, while on their journey. The pair recorded in their journals that this “smaller swan”  made a peculiar call that “began with a kind of whistling sound and terminates in a full round note which is rather louder than the whistling, or former part.”  Because of this, they coined it as the “Whistling Swan” and that is how it officially entered into the science texts.

  Now that I have you thoroughly confused, I need to say that the Whistling Swan name was changed many years ago into Tundra Swan.  And there you have it…mostly (I won’t go into why the name was changed). 

  By the way, George Ord was a busy little science bee when in 1815.  He presented a description of a whole host of new species in addition to the Tundra Swan – many from the L & C expedition.  He named seven other species, including the Black-tailed Prairie Dog, Pronghorn Antelope, Ring-billed Gull, and Microtus pennsylvanicus.  Microtus is the fancy name for Meadow Vole. 

  Although my intended purpose for the stakeout was thwarted, at least I was able to see two of Mr. Ord’s critters.