Australia is the home of the Black Swan, and it is invested by an even
greater interest than attaches to the South American bird, which is
white. For many centuries it was considered to be an impossibility, but
by a singular stroke of fortune, says a celebrated naturalist, we are
able to name the precise day on which this unexpected discovery was
made. The Dutch navigator William de Vlaming, visiting the west coast of
Southland, sent two of his boats on the 6th of January, 1697, to explore
an estuary he had found. There their crews saw at first two and then
more Black Swans, of which they caught four, taking two of them alive to
Batavia; and Valentyn, who several years later recounted this voyage,
gives in his work a plate representing the ship, boats, and birds, at
the mouth of what is now known from this circumstance as the Swan River,
the most important stream of the thriving colony of West Australia,
which has adopted this Swan as its armorial symbol. Subsequent voyagers,
Cook and others, found that the range of the species extended over the
greater part of Australia, in many districts of which it was abundant.
It has since rapidly decreased in number there, and will most likely
soon cease to exist as a wild bird, but its singular and ornamental
appearance will probably preserve it as a modified captive in most
civilized countries, and it is said, perhaps even now there are more
Black Swans in a reclaimed condition in other lands than are at large
in their mother country.
The erect and graceful carriage of the Swan always excites the
admiration of the beholder, but the gentle bird has other qualities not
commonly known, one of which is great power of wing. The _Zoologist_
gives a curious incident relating to this subject. An American physician
writing to that journal, says that the first case of fracture with which
he had to deal was one of the forearm caused by the blows of a Swan's
wing. It was during the winter of 1870, at the Lake of Swans, in
Mississippi, that the patient was hunting at night, in a small boat and
by the light of torches. In the course of their maneuvers a flock of
Swans was suddenly encountered which took to flight without regard
to anything that might be in the way. As the man raised his arm
instinctively to ward off the swiftly rising birds, he was struck on his
forearm by the wing of one of the Swans in the act of getting under
motion, and as the action and labor of lifting itself were very great,
the arm was badly broken, both bones being fractured.
When left to itself the nest of the Swan is a large mass of aquatic
plants, often piled to the height of a couple of feet and about six feet
in diameter. In the midst of this is a hollow which contains the eggs,
generally from five to ten in number. They sit upon the eggs between
five and six weeks.
It is a curious coincidence that this biographical sketch should have
been written and a faithful portrait for the first time shown on the two
hundredth anniversary of the discovery of the Black Swan.
[Illustration: From col. Chi. Acad. Sciences.
BLACK SWAN.
Copyright by
Nature Study Pub. Co., 1898, Chicago.]