Earlier today, at the national wildlife refuge where I teach, I tagged along with a wildlife official who was charged with checking out a pair of tundra swans bagged by a hunter and his son. The boy looked to be about 13, and the swan he shot today was his first.
Swans are one of the popular types of game hunted in this region at this time of year. Tens of thousands of tundra swans stop to rest on the refuge's 75,000 acres of wetlands as they migrate through northern Utah from Alaska's frigid northern coastline to the warmer coasts of California and Oregon. Trumpeter swans follow a few weeks later in numbers that are smaller but no less breathtaking. It is early in the migration yet, so "only" about 17,000 of the massive white tundra swans are paddling about our waters right now. By the end of December, they will number upwards of 50,000.
The boy was excited about his first successful swan hunt and eager to give details as his dad opened the tailgate of their pickup and pulled the limp, feathered bodies into view. The youngster shivered in the cold morning air as he described how the bird fell from the sky with his first shot but did not die until he had delivered a second shot.
It was an especially cold morning, made even more so by the winds that whipped across the wetlands from the north and the gray, sunless sky.
The official checked the birds for flu virus and measured their bills to make certain they were tundra swans, rather than trumpeters. Trumpeter swans may be hunted in Utah, but only 10 of the 2,000 swans taken by Utah hunters in a single season may be trumpeters. If more than 10 are recorded, the season is immediately closed. (As of this writing, no trumpeters had been taken, officials said. Typically, no more than two are recorded in any given season.)
Upon completion of this assessment, we congratulated the hunters on their success and went our separate ways.
It was an odd experience. Barely 20 minutes earlier I had been discussing the concept of migration and extolling the virtues of tundra swans -- live ones -- to a group of 3- to 5-year-olds inside the refuge's visitor center.
The birds taken by the pair of hunters were first-year juveniles, judging by the grayish hue of their head and neck feathers and the lack of yellow teardrop-shaped spots in the area in front of their eyes (the "lores"). Young birds taste good, the hunters said, and the father and son planned on eating their catch.
Once the birds are dressed, cooked and served, I imagine the boy will regale those at the table with how he felled the evening's main course. He will tell of the cold, gray sky and and the wind that nipped mercilessly at the exposed areas of his face while he trudged through the marsh with his dad and waited for just the right bird to fly over at just the right moment.
How different his experience than those of another group of children I taught just last week. We were teaching a program about how America's native people obtained what they needed from the land, and I asked the group where leather comes from]. Not one of them could correctly say, "an animal," let alone a cow or, in the case of native people, a deer. Some guessed that leather comes from trees. One child said dirt, and another actually said "Walmart."
Later that same week, another group of our students studied where their favorite foods come from. Most were astonished to learn that although apples, corn, cheese and other products are produced on Utah farms, many stores obtain these items from other states through processes that require vast expenditures of energy in production, packaging and transport.
I still am not sure how I feel about teaching young children about the amazing abilities of swans while the birds are being hunted for sport somewhere else on the property. It is impossible to adequately describe the thrill of seeing these birds soaring overhead by the thousands, and it was sad seeing two of them lying dead in the back of a pickup.
Still, hunting is what predators and omnivores do. And the human animal is both.
Did the youngster who took his first swan today need the meat? Probably not. His folks could buy chicken or turkey at the store all neatly packaged in foam and plastic wrap. But at least when this boy sat down to eat, he would know where that food had come from, how it looked before it was killed, what its habitat felt and smelled like, and how it came to be on his plate. That probably is more than most of us know about where our food comes from.
And that swan certainly never had to endure the indignities of a feed lot.
