The colourful life of an old bird!
Last week saw the return of Caper, one of the oldest Bewick’s swans on record! Caper first visited Slimbridge back in the autumn of 1989 as a yearling and has now reached the grand old age of 26! He’s now not far behind our record-breakers Winterling and Brimstone who reached 28 and 29 years old, respectively.
Caper faithfully remains with Gambol, his mate of seven years. Neither wintered at Slimbridge last year and we were keeping our fingers crossed for another visit while hoping that nothing untoward had happened. As a firm fixture at Slimbridge, Caper is probably one of the most confident swans on the Lake and is usually found closely following the feeder and grain barrow around the shoreline from start to finish at the 4pm feeds!
As you can imagine, Caper has led quite an interesting life since he hatched from an egg in arctic Russia all those years ago. During that time, he has undertaken 50 flights between the arctic and Northwest Europe, flying more than 75,000 miles! In December 1989, he was caught and ringed at Slimbridge, and, in subsequent years, spotted by our network of observers at various sites in the Netherlands on autumn migration and in Poland, Germany and Estonia in the spring. Caper appears to be a true WWT fan who occasionally visits WWT’s other swan hotspots at Martin Mere and Welney! He has now managed to lose his ring so our only record of him is logged when he returns to Slimbridge where we can identify him by his ‘penny-face’ bill pattern.
Caper’s strong loyalties to his wintering site and faithfulness to his partners (of which he has had only two) demonstrates and epitomises the most enchanting qualities of the Bewick’s swan and we hope to receive a winter visit from him for many more years to come
