Editor’s note: Parts of this article are featured in the latest season of our Chesapeake Uncharted podcast, available at bayjournal.com or wherever you listen to podcasts. The season is a companion to our film, Chesapeake Rhythms, which explores wildlife migrations in the Bay region: graceful tundra swans, beautiful monarch butterflies, elusive eels and flocking shorebirds.
ANNAPOLIS, Md. – Elegant and garrulous, tundra swans herald the return of autumn in the Chesapeake Bay region.
Globally, their numbers are plentiful and stable. So, why in recent decades are significantly fewer of them wintering along the Bay? The answer has more to do with the condition of the nation’s largest estuary than it does with the health of its largest species of waterfowl, according to wildlife officials.
Tundra swans are hard to miss, measuring about 4.5 feet from beak to tail with a wingspan of more than 5 feet. When enough gather on the same stretch of water, the mass of white bodies can resemble snowbanks or ice floes. They have long, straight necks topped by a head with a black beak. And most have a yellow spot at the base of each eye.
Tundra swans (Cygnus columbianis) were once known as “whistling” swans because of the noise their wings made in flight. They can sometimes be confused with mute swans, an invasive species in the Bay region. But these have orange bills and S-curved necks. Further, mute swans live year-round in the Mid-Atlantic region while tundra swans only swoop in from late autumn to early spring.
Just south of the Bay watershed, tundra swans are among the biggest stars of the annual show put on by migratory waterfowl in coastal North Carolina in the late fall and winter, said William “Hunter” Morris, a wildfowl biologist with the state’s Wildlife Resources Commission.
“A great, big old white bird draws quite a bit of attention to itself,” Morris said. “We generally have a lot of them, and people like to look at them.”
Tundra swans breed in the Arctic during warmer months. In North America, they are grouped into Eastern and Western populations. The Eastern band travels more than 4,000 miles to winter in coastal areas from Maryland to North Carolina — mostly the latter nowadays.
Annual surveys conducted by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service typically count 90,000-100,000 birds in the Eastern population, but their numbers unexpectedly dropped from a record high of 137,000 in 2023 to a 45-year low of 64,000 in 2024. Wildlife officials chalk up that decline to normal annual variation and not to any specific factors or threats.
As recently as the 1960s, the tundra swan population in North Carolina only numbered in the low thousands. In recent decades, the state has averaged approximately 65,000-75,000 wintering tundra swans, mostly in and immediately around the neck of land between the Albemarle and Pamlico sounds, Morris said. He suspects that the birds found the region more hospitable after many of its forests were plowed under for cropland, offering them a ready food source.
“We had swans, but nothing anywhere near like it is now,” he said.
But that influx might not have happened if not for concurrent changes in the Chesapeake Bay’s fragile ecosystem, according to Morris and other experts.
The Bay’s water quality had been on the decline for many years largely because of increasing nutrient and sediment pollution flowing off city streets, suburban yards and farm fields during heavy rain. The biggest turning point came in 1972, when the remnants of Hurricane Agnes triggered widespread flooding and a multi-decade downturn in the Bay’s health.
The cloudy water in the Bay and its tributaries smothered much of the underwater grasses that had fed and nourished generations of tundra swans, said Kayla Harvey, waterfowl program manager for the Maryland Department of Natural Resources. As their preferred food dwindled, tundra swans began feeding in farm fields on waste grains, such as corn and soybeans.
By the 1980s and ’90s, North Carolina surpassed the Chesapeake as the population’s most important wintering ground.
Hunting pressure doesn’t appear to have impeded that trend. While Maryland legislators tried to legalize hunting the birds, arguing that it would bring in permit revenue, the bill died in committee. North Carolina, though, is among 10 states (including Delaware and Virginia in the Bay watershed) where tundra swan hunting is allowed. Because North Carolina has the largest population, the state receives the lion’s share of the federally allocated permits for the Eastern region — usually around 4,800 of the 5,600 total.
Bringing more tundra swans back to the Chesapeake will require continued efforts to revive its ecosystem, Harvey said. The biggest determinant will be increasing underwater grasses through actions such as direct seeding and improving water quality to support more growth, she added.
But stoking a revival of that vital food source hasn’t come easy amid warming water temperatures and up-and-down progress with reducing pollution.
In 2014, the Chesapeake Bay Program, the state-federal partnership that guides the Bay’s cleanup, set a goal of expanding vegetation coverage to 185,000 acres by 2025. The 2024 aerial survey of Bay grasses found 78,451 acres.
The program’s updated cleanup agreement, set for approval by the end of the year, proposes increasing that goal to 196,000 acres Baywide with an interim target of 95,000 acres by 2035.
“Keeping on track with the restoration of the Chesapeake Bay is important and keeping our [underwater grasses] increasing and restoring those,” Harvey said. “That’s important to keep seeing these beautiful birds around the area.”