An unfortunate find

Lincoln grade school students on a field trip made a surprising discovery at Snowbank Lake last Thursday when they spotted a dead swan floating along the shore.

Elaine Caton, the Swan Restoration Program and Education Coordinator for the Blackfoot Challenge, who had helped organize three days of presentations for the 5th and 6th graders, was also on the trip to examine the fire's effect upon the landscape.

The large bird was found floating upside down so Caton had hoped it might be one of the more common tundra swans rather than a trumpeter swan, which the Challenge has been working successfully to re-introduce to the Blackfoot watershed since 2005.

However, after getting a look at the bird's head, she found it was indeed a trumpeter.

Based on the apparent gray coloring on its neck, she suspects it was a juvenile swan that may have originally hatched in the valley and had returned.

Caton said they know of 19 trumpeter swans that hatched in the Blackfoot Valley last year, but said there may be others they weren't aware of.

Caton wasn't able determine what had killed the swan, and found it a little odd that it was in Snowbank Lake, since the Trumpeters tend to stick to the waters of the Blackfoot River valley rather than the higher elevation lakes.

With the help of a couple students, Caton retrieved the carcass for a possible necropsy to determine what killed it.

"I'll take it to the US Fish and Wildlife Service and they'll decide," she said. "It would be nice if they could find out if somebody shot it or something. Hopefully not. I'd hate to think that happened."

Caton reported last June that 36 trumpeters return to the watershed, including 13 mating pairs.