Trumpet Mutes

Beautiful Invaders

This post was going to be a fluff-piece about Purple-Loosestrife.

I had been chatting with a local store owner, actually initially about lilies (he and my partner share a nauseous reaction to them). I had been remarking about the beauty of the Tiger Lily, that escapee from cultivation that now provides such a wonderful orange trim to so many New England and Upstate New York roadsides every July (or are they Ditch Lilies?). He agreed, and added that that was nothing in comparison to the Purple-Loosestrife that come August would be blanketing many of the local fields in a carpet of reddish lavender often complemented by Goldenrod. I couldn’t wait. But then he warned me “strictly speaking, it’s an invasive species.”

As we drove home I realized that this last sentence was nagging me. Notwithstanding the fact that I was a little worried that I was not yet 100% on board with what an Invasive Species was, I was fascinated by the idea that I might be prepared to put up with some ambivalence about their environmental effects if I found them to be, well, good-looking.

As Ipetrus explains it:

The interface between the greater public’s definition of beauty and the havoc wreaked by invaders on natural areas is brought into stark focus. Many garden ornamentals are seen to be beautiful, and any attempt to take them away pricks at the public’s heart strings causing the message of harm to become obscured. How we define beauty is an underlining fundamental challenge in the on going conversation about invasive species.

Or as Jennifer Forman, in “Invasive Species weblog” frames the question:

Feathers and Fluff – The attention an invasive species gets is frequently determined by how charismatic it is, whether that attention is positive (mute swan) or negative (snakeheads).

And thus was I diverted.

The Northern Snakehead, native to China, Russia and Korea, looks like Central Casting’s idea of the Fish From Hell.

Teeth like needles  and a murderous visage, it has a predilection for eating its prey whole and in large numbers. In addition, it can walk on land, using its fins to do a kind of soldier crawl, and can breath oxygen through a primitive lung. Whenever some idiot releases any of these into U.S. waters (and it happens quite often, as they are legally sold live for food) it causes a panic among local environmental protection agencies who invariably come down hard and fast to stop them from colonizing, as has already probably happened to some degree in the Potomac. Given its villainous features, it strikes me that few people would question moves towards its removal even if its worst crime was ruining the occasional angler’s day, but the fact is that it’s a top level predator (which means that it’s in the enviable position of having nothing above it in the food chain) and is a serious threat to the native fish populations. When Northern Snakeheads were discovered in 3 ponds in Crofton, MD (an incident that inspired not one, but two movies) a fast-clearing chemical called Rotoenone was added to the water, killing the entire fish population in order to remove any trace of the Snakehead.  I guess you could say that had to destroy the ponds in order to save them. Most people regard the Northern Snakehead as a nasty piece of work with zero redeeming features, whose eradication would be met with almost universal approval.

Nobody talks that way about the Mute Swan, which is what I, growing up in England, would refer to simply as a swan. Regardless of their opinion of their environmental impact, most are to one degree or another enchanted by their undeniable grace of form. In addition, they are rarely written about without mentioning their fierce devotion to their lifelong mate, a quality much prized, though not so often achieved, by their human observers. Its introduction into the U.S. has however been negatively received in the main because of 2 factors –it consumes a huge amount of underwater vegetation, and it often gets nasty towards both humans and other wildfowl, including other subgenus of swan, crowding them out of their natural habitats (the wildfowl, not the humans) in the process. It is a duty of all British parents to instruct their children not to mess with (Mute) swans as. we were told,  they can kill you with one blow from their wing. This rarely happens, as we all know to a keep a respectful distance, especially when the swan is guarding its cygnets. This aggression towards humans is common to other types of swan including the American native Trumpeter Swan. Where the Mute Swan differs is in how its territoriality affects other wildfowl. Mute Swans are known to aggressively guard territories of up to 6 acres. A very serious case of Mute Swan aggression occurred in Tar Bay, an island community located in the Chesapeake Bay region in the early ‘90’s when 600 to a thousand swans caused the abandonment of colonial nesting sites for state-threatened birds.

Regulatory measures have now been adopted in many states to control their populations. For the most part this is achieved relatively benignly using egg ‘addling’, a marvelously Chaucerian word that means “confusing”. In our context it refers to the practice of temporarily removing eggs from the nest so that embryo development can be terminated, and then returning them quickly so that the swan is fooled into thinking that the eggs are still developing. If the swan was not thus mislead, she would start laying again.

These measures have not been adopted without controversy. Maybe some of the denial over the negative effects of the introduction of the mute swan derives from not wanting to acknowledge that something capable of bringing so much beauty to our day can really be having that negative an impact. Perhaps, in addition, Americans who travel over to Europe and observe the Mutes in their dominant, native habitat are  forgetting that a species that lives in balance with the ecosystem in one part of the world might need to be regarded as invasive somewhere else. A prominent spokes-site for the pro-Mute Swan ticket is the pressure group Save The Mute Swans (“Mute Swan, citizen of the World”). They point out that there is archeological evidence for the existence of Mute Swans that migrated to North America along with other European subgenus, and thus they have just as strong a claim to be a native species as do the Trumpeter or the Tundra Swan (these claims are rejected as specious by the U.S. Department of the Interior). So the argument goes; you are calling the Mute Swan invasive, but it has already been here before, so it is not invading. And they have a point, in that the ecological state that one chooses to preserve is somewhat arbitrary. Anyway, it seems clear from the European experience that there is, at the very least, a limit to the Mute Swan’s expansionist ambitions. They have not, after all, become the Asian Clam of the waterfowl world in Great Britain. Furthermore, Save The Mute Swans, denies any ecological damage by its namesake and even points out that the prodigious algae consumption cited by opponents of the bird as a detriment to the environment can in fact be seen as an advantage, helping to improve access to shallow bay areas. They also point out that it is protected in some states, such as Connecticut. It’s a tricky one. The Mute Swan’s negative impact on American waters seems, from what I can observe, to be fairly limited and its presence brings pleasure to many people. I have no idea what the answer to this question is. I am equally suspicious of anthropomorphic sentimentality as I am of possible conservationist dogma – the over the top-ness of a community that puts up a memorial by the roadside pond to it’s beautiful lost swan who was unfortunate enough to wander onto the neighboring highway at exactly the wrong moment, versus “This will not stand, this aggression by the Mute Swan”.

In any case, I guess my point is that the Mute Swan’s good looks are an asset that the Northern Snakehead would, well, kill for.

At which point I gratefully retreat back to the Purple-Loosestrife, after a short panic to confirm that I hadn’t been taking pictures of and writing about Fireweed by mistake all along, and with the added advantage of a few days to meditate on the effect that beauty can have on our attitude towards Invasive Species. I had initially been charmed by the intense swathes of purple, especially when Goldenrod was also present – it is a color scheme I am most attracted to, and its bursting out a few weeks ago most certainly raised my spirits on otherwise mundane drives and walks. I could quite easily have carried on through life with the cheerful nonchalance of this writer back in 1998 who may or may not have been joking when he said:

Yeah, there’s bloody great fields of it here now. It’s stunningly beautiful.I guess I should be upset that it’s displacing native plants and allegedly animals, but I gotta tell ya, you can only take so many green fields.

The price of these beautiful swathes of purple can include the crowding out of native species such as cattail, sedge and bulrush, which are home to an abundance of wildlife. Areas where wild rice grows, or where fish spawn can be degraded. It is estimated that 190,000 hectares of wetlands, marshes, pastures and riparian meadows are affected in North America each year, with an economic impact of millions of dollars. In addition, they also take the place of valuable stopover sites for migrating birds. It’s a bummer, but there it is – It ain’t enough to just look good.

In addition to pulling, cutting and digging, the USDA recommends bringing in the cavalry, in the form of Galerucella calmariensis and G. pusilla, two Leaf beetles and other host-specific plant-feeding beetles and weevils to chow down on the pretty but noxious weed.

About the Author

Drinking water straight from the well? Check. Septic System? Check. Propane tanks? Check. It’s official then – I’ve moved to the country. And my city smarts are all of a sudden woefully inadequate. Welcome to the Rural Rookie, the ongoing tale of a London-born New York-based San Franciscan bringing his Beginner’s Mind to the wacky task of relocating to Upstate New York . . you can read more at

http://www.ruralrookie.com

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