Elegy for Swans

For the last four months, thanks to West Tisbury animal control officer Joan Jenkinson, swans — long missing from the town’s Mill Pond — have once again been in residence there. When the pond was ice-covered this winter the animal control officer has seen that the birds were fed on home-baked corn bread and stale bread that Cronig’s Market provided. At times when the ice cover was thick, Mrs. Jenkinson helped to melt it by pumping in warm water so the swans could feed on pond grass as well as the crumbs of bread.

But last Friday the swan named Giorgio, who had selected the pond to be his home in November, apparently set out to find more open waters where more food was readily available. He had done that before and returned. But this time as he embarked on his flight Giorgio struck an electric wire near the garden club headquarters at the old mill.

Three weeks ago Babette, another swan resident of the pond, died in the same fashion. And meanwhile the swan named Sally drowned in the culvert under the road last month, apparently driven out by Giorgio, who preferred the company of Babette.

And if all this sounds a bit like the beginning of a script for some tragic opera, in fact there is a practical side to the story. In view of the two electric wire tragedies, Mrs. Jenkinson is hoping she can persuade the electric company NStar to dangle brightly-colored tape from the power line to keep any future swans from striking it.

And she says she has no intention of letting the Mill Pond be without swans again. Their beauty is self-evident. Their usefulness in eating grasses that otherwise fill up the pond and threaten to make it a swamp is less obvious. Mrs. Jenkinson doesn’t want that to happen, and most of West Tisbury agrees with her. She needs the pond to stay a pond so it can serve as a refuge for injured birds, she says. And certainly it is true that most Islanders treasure the Mill Pond — and its swans — for their beauty.

But right now we join Mrs. Jenkinson in mourning the loss of Giorgio and Babette and Sally and hope that they will soon be replaced.