The elegant black swans which gather in their hundreds on the Bridgewater stretch of the Derwent at this time of year have certainly been given a bad press during the Coronavirus crisis.
How come the pandemic ravaging the world has been called a “black swan” event?
The global chaos has nothing to do with swans, of course. The devastating virus causing havoc throughout the world in recent months is also not related to the “bird flu” which struck some years back.
The term originates from the erroneous presumption in Ancient Rome that black swans did not exist and the appearance of one was a freakish occurrence, on a par with a black sheep. After the sighting of black swans by early European explorers, this became a metaphor for an unexpected event that has an unforeseen significance.
The Roman poet Juvenal might have coined the phrase in the second century but it was not until 1697 that the Dutch explorer Willem de Vlamingh actually saw black swans in Western Australia. It must have been something of a shock to discover, in what was later appropriately named the Swan River, not only a sixth species of swan, but one that broke the rule of swans being white in colour.
Although the most elegant of them all, the truly pure-white mute swan of northern Europe, which has inspired opera and ballet, including Swan Lake, I prefer the Australian version of the swan clan within the wider duck and geese family.
The other white swans are found in the near-Arctic regions of Europe and in far northern North America. The only other southern swan is one found in Argentina, which actually has a black neck.
We might take pride in our swans but the species once had a troubled relationship with the settlers who followed the European explorers after that initial sighting by de Vlamingh. Although the swans lived in harmony with the first Australians for thousands of years, the European pioneers drove the species to near extinction, hunting swans for feathers and food.
The decline was so dramatic laws had to be passed in the Tasmanian Parliament in the late 1800s to protect the birds. The black swan is especially vulnerable for a period after the breeding season in summer when it sheds its flight feathers in a winter moult, and so for about a month it is unable to fly. At this time it congregates in vast numbers on open stretches of fresh water, such as the upper Derwent at Bridgewater.
The black swan (Cygnus atratus) is now afforded total protection.
The swan featured in some of the first wildlife illustrations to come out of Australia and, before this, it was also widely portrayed by Aboriginal artists in coastal rock and cave paintings.
It’s a shame that such graceful birds should enter the lexicon for all the wrong reasons but, viewed from this end of the world, I would not suggest these troubled times should perhaps be called a white swan event.